Viking Dr, Pleasant Hill

Viking Drive is only about a mile long. It is named after the mascot of Diablo Valley College, the community college that Viking Drive passes by on its way up to Morello Avenue. Viking Blvd starts right across from the entrance to the Sun Valley Mall near to Macy’s. For the first too blocks, Viking is your average middle class residential street with a fair number of trees lining the very walkable sidewalks.

As you get passed this early residential section, however, you come upon two schools. On the northern side you will see Diablo Valley College, the very good community college that serves as the main feeder school for the University of California, Berkeley. It has a wide range of classes and is considered a good inexpensive way of getting your AA or transferring to a local four year (it also transfers a large section of its student body to Davis and Cal State Hayward as well as Cal). On the southern side of the street, you will see College Park High School, which supplies many of the students that go to Diablo Valley College.

These two schools create a lot of traffic for Viking Drive, which is one of the drawbacks of this street. This is especially the case on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings which seem to be the peek times for DVC’s classes. Although the front of the school is technically on the other side of DVC by Golf Club Road, this side still gets a lot of traffic.

Once you get passed the school, you will find even nicer, upper middle class homes but within two blocks Viking Drive comes to an end at Morello Way. If it were not for the school traffic these would make for really nice place to live, but all the cars going by every weekday morning could really get old fast. On the other hand, you would have access to the tennis courts and tracks of the schools, and could be close enough to walk to either one of these, or even to the Sun Valley Mall any time you wanted.