SFO gap and Safe Harbor

Start/End: Start car was at the Marriot parking lot (there's dedicated parking for the trail on the left, while the gates to the hotel parking are to the right). Our finish car was at Safe Harbor. We parked in the Samtrans lot to the right. There's parking to the right as well, but there was construction equipment there and it's also a homeless shelter.

Notes: We considered how to run this gap for a long time. So far we've found easy alternatives for running gap segments. In most cases in the south bay, proposed segments of the trail's spine are runnable, even if they might be on the shoulder of a road. In this case though you can't follow the proposed route for most of the way past the airport as the trail is proposed to run along the train line, and then through what appears to be PG&E property. It didn't seem worth it to attempt either of those options, as neither is bay front anyway, so we routed ourselves as close to the tracks as possible.

Along this route we saw basically no other humans.

Once you head back across 101 the trail starts up at the north end of the airport. A small sign facing the long way shows the map of the trail to come. This section is a little sad, routed under the maze of freeway structures along a trash strewn creek.

At the end of our outing we circled Safe Harbor, which is a loop around a bus depot, but with some bird watching. We saw one other person who appeared to be a bird watcher.

Generally it was an interesting run through the neighborhoods, but we're kind of glad to have found the trail again and to be past the airport.