Part 3
My only other blackout was in 1998, when I had gone for one of my long bicycle rides on one of my favorite routes in the Palo Alto Baylands. There is a very wide levy out there that stretches for almost a mile along the edge of the bay with plenty of wetlands on the other side of it. I had once had to work by myself for half a day out in these wetlands a little further north in East Palo Alto, when my company was working with Pacific Bell to install cable TV in 1986 in several cities in this area. I was strand mapping at that point of the project, plotting transmission lines.
I rode my mountain bike back and forth along the levy three times as usual. I really like the return trip of the second direction I go on that levy, because it is almost always very windy out there and coming back I can get up to near 30MPH or more and sustain it for almost 1,000 yards by just peddling.
When I leave the Baylands, I go by the sewer treatment plant, the dump, and then along Embarcadero Rd. past the Palo Alto Airport with a golf course and driving range next to that. I noticed I was more tired than usual.
I go quickly up the overpass of Highway 101 and down the other side. Then a few streets past that I go left down a residential street for about four blocks until I get to Oregon Expressway. I can still remember very clearly going through my neighborhood of Palo Alto on this leg of the route, because of the amazing nature of my blackout. I got to Oregon and as usual crossed half of it and got in the left turn lane and turned left across the other half. This is a maneuver that is unmistakable. I continued bicycling as normal. The next thing I know I come along the residential street to the stop sign at the busy four-lane Embarcadero Rd. again. What the hell happened? I knew then, and I've known all along, since that, that I could not possibly have crossed the busy and dangerous-to-pedestrians Oregon Expressway again without having realized I crossed it. It was so mysterious to me that I thought I had done a disappearing act performed by God to amuse me (I still was suffering from severe depression at that time after getting totally screwed by a cult. That story:
http://www.thoughts.com/QuickHitGon...versal--215674/ ).
There was just no way I could've crossed that expressway again without knowing it!
For many years, I kind of thought I had disappeared, but then I concluded that it was just a blackout and had crossed Oregon in a total blackout.
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