Your Vodka's Probably Not Russian

People are reacting in ways big and small to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. One of them is throwing out vodka. Several states have banned the sale of Russian vodka, and various bar owners have posted video of themselves pouring bottles of vodka down the drain. Should you throw away your vodka, too, in solidarity? Probably not, because your vodka's probably not Russian.

Many prominent brands of vodka in the US have never been Russian. For example, Absolut and Svedka are from Sweden. Ketel One is from Netherlands. Grey Goose is French. Belvedere is from Poland. Tito's and Skyy are American.

Even popular vodkas with Russian-sounding names are not actually Russian. Smirnoff is made in America now. Stolichnaya, the brand my Russian-native friends in college always bought— Shtoly, as they called it— moved production in 2000 to Latvia, a NATO member country. Years ago these brands were Russian. Consolidation in the beverage industry into a small number of multinational giants changed that.

Hiking the Stevens Creek Trail

The Stevens Creek Trail is one of those so-close-we-tend-to-overlook-it hiking opportunities. ...Actually that's only half true. It is close, but I don't overlook it. I haven't hiked it in a while because I've hiked it so many times in the past. A week ago Sunday we decided to hike the trail again.

...Yes, this hiking travelog is from a week ago. I got backlogged this past week as work got crazy.


The Stevens Creek Trail tells an interesting story as it slices through different parts of Mountain View. It starts in a remote corner of the city that most people would think is Sunnyvale, as it's across Highway 85. From there it crosses over a pedestrian/cyclist bridge to the main part of Mountain View and heads north. Along the way it comes close to but doesn't really touch several of Mountain View's business districts. Instead it stick to a greenbelt on either side of Highway 85, granting walkers, joggers, skaters, and cyclists a sense of being in nature rather than a busy city. Only the sound of 6 lanes of rushing traffic less than 20 meters away indicates otherwise. 😅

Further north the trail crosses under US-101, some twelve lanes of rushing traffic, and enters the Shoreline district of Mountain View. This is where we started the trail last Sunday.

Anyway, out past 101 the trail starts to open up a bit. The trail itself doesn't get wider (yet) but the views around it do as it exits forested areas into the grasslands of the marshy Shoreline area. Here, too, closer to the bay, you actually see water in Stevens Creek— water that brings with it a lot of birds and other animals. Further south it's dry except immediately after rainfall.

The first picture I've included here (right/above) is from this section of trail. It's actually from the end of our hike, though— the last few minutes before we returned to the trailhead. The light got better as we were finishing up 🙄 and I captured this nice shot with the wildflowers along the trail.



The Shoreline area isn't just about being near the edge of the SF Bay (the "shore"). It's also the tech center of Mountain View. We parked behind a Microsoft building and walked past countless Google buildings on the trail. Across the creek are two of these "flying saucer" buildings. They're not even occupied yet. Blame the Covid pandemic for that. They're of the same design as a building Nvidia has at the junction of Central and San Tomas Expressways in Santa Clara. Here in Mountain View Google already occupies 1-2 of them and has another 2 waiting to go. Oh, and that square-faced building behind it on the right side in the pic above is NASA's wind tunnel. NASA's Space Camp used to be out here, too. (They moved it several years ago.)



Speaking of NASA, they've got a sizeable installation out here, at Moffett Field. There are dozens of buildings... and land that just goes on and on. The campus look big, but not huge, as you speed by on 101. As you walk along the creek toward the bay you see how far back it goes. And as it goes back you reach its back lots, as in the picture above, where sharp eyed folks can spot signs dating to aerospace projects from the 1950s.



Out here the vistas really open up because... well... there's pretty much nothing in the way. In the pic above we've crossed over another footbridge to the opposite side of the creek. The Stevens Creek Trail more or less ends to the left of here. This trail continues on quite a bit further, atop a levee with a slough on one side and ponds on the other.



We continued out the bay trail for a while longer, then forked to the right and entered the Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge for a bit. Yes, it's the same Don Edwards NWR we hiked in in Alviso— three cities away. The park stretches miles across the southern reaches of the San Francisco Bay.

Could we walk all the way from the park entry in Alviso to here? Yes, and no. No, we couldn't walk in the park the whole way. We'd have to leave its boundaries a few times. But there is a nice network of bayside trails around Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and on north. For example, the Sunnyvale Baylands we've hiked in several times is adjacent to Don Edwards and provides several miles of trails that help connect things together.



We hiked out on this lonely looking levee (above) for 1/2 mile or so before turning back and retracing out steps to the car. Out here it was pretty lonely. We passed only 2-3 people on this farthest-out leg of the trail. By the time we passed back by all the Google buildings, the empty flying saucers and the NASA wind tunnel, and got to the Microsoft building the trail had grown steadily more crowded again.

By the time we were at the car again, Hawk's step counter indicated we'd hiked at least 4 miles. Our legs and feet felt like it was 5. Either way, it was pretty good for hiking just a part of this city trail.