The weather was nice this weekend and we had no other obligations so we decided that it would be a great day to finally check out the bouldering at Castle Rock. During the morning, Judy came across an ad in the paper for a piano warehouse sale. There were some pretty compelling prices listed so we decided to check it out. The sale was at Carnes Piano in Palo Alto so we decided to stop by on our way to Castle Rock.

We got to the store and were greeted by a nice gentleman by the name of Bob. We were told that the reason for the sale was because they were closing down their piano warehouse (which was right across the parking lot from the main store) and they therefore had to clear all the pianos in the warehouse.

Judy tried a bunch of different baby grands, and decided that there were two that she liked, both Story and Clarks and both in the $5-$7K range. Well, actually, the one she really liked was in the $15K range, but that was a bit out of budget.

After thanking Bob for his time, we continued on our way to Castle Rock. The drive wasn’t too bad, but Page Mill Road was a bit windy for our tastes. When we got to the park, it was really crowded and there was no parking to be found, either in the free parking area or the fee parking lot. We circled around a few times and ended up just waiting for someone to leave in the parking lot. According to the ranger, the park was rarely this crowded – typically there’s parking galore. It must have been the beautiful weather that brought people out in droves, especially after several weekends of not-so-great weather.

We met Jimmy and Colleen in the parking lot who, unfortunately, had just gotten a parking ticket for parking just outside of the allowable parking zone. Although he didn’t look familiar to us, Jimmy recognized us from Planet Granite. We followed him up the trail to the first set of boulders.

We hit the Mr. Magoo boulder and spent the day there. Bouldering at Castle Rock is pretty cool. The rock is sandstone and there are lots of sloper holds, which was good practice for both of us. There were quite a few climbers in the area, but again, this was abnormal. We overheard one of the climbers there comment about how many people were there and that usually, there would only be one or two groups of climbers in the area.

After a fun few hours of bouldering, we headed back. Going home, we took the 35 all the way. This was much faster and without all the windiness. It is actually a beautiful stretch of road with lots of greenery and was fun to drive. We’ll most likely be taking this route to Castle Rock in the future as it will probably only take around 40 minutes or so.

For dinner, we went to Fortune Star, one of our favorite Chinese food restaurants in the area. At the end of the meal, we got our fortune cookies and Judy’s read:

“The constructive use of riches is better than its possession.”

Wow! Is that a sign or what? Clearly, Judy should buy the baby grand. Driving home from the restaurant, we passed, believe it or not, a Carnes Piano just a few blocks from our house. We didn’t even know it existed until right then. Yet another sign. Hmmmm…

Posted by Roger at 7:11 PM.