There are 40+ million people in this big state and I felt the
paranoia as I approached it from Sparks a few weeks ago. The beat of life
increases and the tension rises. Everything just comes at you a lot quicker. You
have to get up to speed just to stand still.


I do my best to stay away from urban areas and population concentrations to
nurture my more languorous rhythms, and when I crossed the state line I made
sure that I headed for areas that were as rural as possible. One great place I
found was the San Francisco Bay Trail, especially the section from Marina Park
in San Leandro in the east bay south to the Hayward-San Mateo bridge.


Ten of thousands of birds especially at low tide. Great white tailed kites
hunting (kiting) ground squirrels. Thanks to the good works on the part of lots of folks
remaking these areas back into fertile grounds.


I had to laugh about the craziness of California when a paraglidress got into a
verbal brawl with Tim Morley in the land zone at Lake McClure. This female
pilot, who apparently thinks that she is the hottest female aerobatic paraglider
pilot in the World, teaches maneuver clinics at Don Pedro Reservoir just down
the road from Lake McClure (which is also a reservoir). She was in the LZ to
belligerently display to Tim her utter dismay that the Mother Load Sky Riders
kept paraglider pilots out of their site.


She came in with an attitude and just ratcheted up the rhetoric as she and Tim
got into it. She claimed that she had a inside connection with the launch land
owners (ooh, there's a way to create conflicts and problems with our most
precious resource) and that she'd find a way in. The fact that the landing zone is
always in a tenuous situation and if the accident rate went up, especially
endangering the public, it could be lost, was most on Tim's mind. The MLSR
already have a long standing agreement with the irrigation district that
precludes paragliding.


Well that didn't stop our paraglidress (or perhaps it was her husband) as on
Sunday they banditoed the launch, launching a few hundred yards away from the
hang glider launch when no one was looking. The keyed gate to the launch had a
combo lock on it for the weekend so we assume that she found out the combination
and drove up her Ford Escort to the bottom of the four wheel drive section (it's
almost straight up from there).


Fortunately for them the paraglider pilot (husband or wife) was able to land
back on top without having to deal with the hang glider pilots in the landing
zone. You've got to wonder just how this kind of behavior is going to advance
their cause. Perhaps they feel that they can just run over these old guys.