Mundane Monday: Overpass

Geocaching and the Mundane Monday challenge are a good match. I was looking for a cache to keep my streak going (I’ve now gone 123 consecutive days with a find), and I found a great caching series based on the planets. The cache for the sun is located in downtown San Jose, Mercury is a mile away, and caches for the other planets up to Neptune are placed at proportional distances away from the sun. Each planet’s cache also has clues in its logbook, and when you find the cache, you write down its clues so that when you add the clues up, you will get the coordinates for a Halley’s Comet cache. I have to find that one!

So I was in the vicinity of the cache for planet Earth last week, and it seemed to make sense for me to walk there from a mall. The walk was somewhat longer than I expected, due to some construction that I had to go around, but I ended up coming out along a busy street and walking under an overpass.

You don’t think anything of these when you drive under or over them, but walking, you spend a fair amount of time in the tunnel, you hear the echoes, and you realize it was not built on a pedestrian scale. It was built for machines.

Climb up the concrete stairs . . .

. . . and then, a quiet street:

I see a lot of this in the SF Bay area: the co-existence and intermingling of nature and trees with cars and their associated structures.

I wonder how it will all look after the oil age has passed. Will people still pass under these tunnels, children giggling running up and down the stairs, teenagers daring each other to climb higher and higher like in the movie, “Divergent,” and wondering what they were originally built for?