Archive for September, 2008

Today I headed downtown about noon and planned to walk and see where the day took me. I ended up matching my 20 mile walk in Boston with another 20 miler, only with lots more hills thrown in.

I started out at the Public Market and Ferry Terminal

Headed up Telegraph Hill

To Coit Tower

Got some good views towards the main part of downtown San Fran

Saw San Francisco’s steepest street (Filbert) with over 30 percent grade. Note that the sidewalk is stairs.

The famous curvy brick section of Lombard Street

I headed over past the Palace of Fine Arts Theater into the Presidio of San Francisco, with my eventual goal being to end up at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (art museum).

But I unexpectedly stumbled out of the Presidio into a beautiful day with no fog and a clear view out at the ocean.

And an even clearer view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I hopped on a trail that turned out to be the Batteries to Bluffs trail. It drops down to several different beaches, some rockier than others.

I saw some of the abandoned military batteries.

And crossed Baker Beach on my way towards Lincoln Park.

To get to Lincoln Park, I took Sea Bluff Drive and El Camino Del Mar, which features some of the nicest real estate in the city, mixed with some absurdly large mansions. While I’d pass on the houses that were just too big and without a view, many of the houses on the bluffs were amazing with 3-4 stories of picture windows looking directly out towards the bay and ocean.

I got to the area near the Legion of Honor about 5:00, which wasn’t the best timing considering it closed at 5:15. That’s alright though, because all the cool stuff I stumbled upon was an unexpected surprise. I hopped on the coastal trail through Lincoln Park next.

And as you can tell, I walked a good distance away from the bridge.

All the way to the beach on the Pacific Ocean. There were nice 6-8 foot waves that surfers were making sure to take full advantage of.

I thought this turned out rather well, given the fact that I was taking a picture directly at the sun. The sailboat is a little small. It makes me wish I had an SLR and some lenses. Much of the day’s walk made me want a better camera, actually.

I turned back to the East and headed through park of Golden Gate Park. I’m not sure why there is a windmill in a tulip garden, but there is.

Homer Simpson makes an appearance on Balboa Street.

Drunken Sushi anyone?

Nearly 7 hours and 20 miles later, I got a chance to rest my legs while watching Joey’s softball team in their final game of the season. Joey had a big night at the plate with 3 homers and 10 RBIs.

He also pitched the game. They won the game courtesy of the mercy rule when they were up by 15 runs (21-6).

We grabbed a drink and parted ways until we meet again. Now I’m back at the hotel getting reorganized to move to San Jose tomorrow (assuming the truck is ready in the morning, that is).

So throw that original plan of playing tourist in San Francisco out the window until tomorrow. Instead, Lyndsay and I rented a car and headed south on Highway 1 through Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz all the way to Monterey. Here’s what we found:

THE DRIVE DOWN

Pumpkins galore and more!

The Ocean? Who knew!

Still there? Just checking.

The road ahead

MONTEREY BAY FISHERMAN’S WHARF


Just in case you don’t read the text…

The Boardwalk

He was ready for his closeup!

Clam chowda and a bread bowl. I asked for supersize. I guess on this coast it’s “chowder” now that I think about it.

Zoltar and best best friend/mortal enemy Merlin

Tha canday! Tha canday! Sugar high!

17 MILE DRIVE

Zippy little rental car

Mini mansion.

Straight up mansion!

Spanish Bay

Spyglass Hill Golf Course

Cypress tree forest. And an arrow telling you to go off-roading.

Cypress Point Lookout

The Lone Cypress

Red & green plants, rocks, water, sky

Pescadero Point

Pebble Beach: the sign

Pebble Beach: the course

THE DRIVE NORTH


Santa Cruz Boardwalk (+1 ominous shadow)

Fresh produce (Yum strawberries!)

The sun beginneth to setteth over the oceanus pacifica

POST-TAPAS AND SANGRIA FOR DINNER WITH LYNDSAY AND HER FRIEND AND JOEY AND KELLY


Mucha handstand attempt!

Mucha handstand attempt #28: success!

Success! Time to dance!

San Fran International airport terminal, where after taking the BART to get to the hotel, I was let down by the courtesy shuttle and ended up splitting a cab with a cute girl. Sorry Adam fan club, didn’t get her number.

Now for tomorrow’s plan, reference the end of the post prior to this one.

//
Let’s go get lost
Let’s go get lost
Blue you sit so pretty
West of the One
Sparkle light with yellow icing
Just a mirror for the sun
Just a mirror for the sun
Just a mirror for the sun

Last night I went downtown with Joey. We ended up at the office of some of his friends for a game of poker. It ended up being me and 9 dot com startup execs and employees from various companies. I’d never really played much poker before, much less for money, so I decided if nothing else I’d be paying to get a lesson.

I lost most of my money before I finally got a good feel for what I was doing, but eventually I found a rhythm and started choosing the right hands to play. I was down to $3.25 when a really good hand followed by a really good bluff turned my game around. I took the $3.25 and turned it into nearly $100. I managed to be one of the final four at the table, but my strategy of never backing down to Joey failed me. I’d called his bluff twice already and won, but the third time we went head to head he took me all in and his trip 2s beat my pair. This is his stack of chips after he took my stack and took me out of the game.

It wasn’t a bad strategy and I didn’t mind passing chips to Joey anyway, but I knew I was testing my luck going all in. And now I know how to hold my own in a poker game.

Today we played kickball in Golden Gate Park. It took a little while to get things organized, but once we did it was a lot of fun. Sloshball, as it’s called, is made difficult by the fact that you always have to have a cup in your hand, so you basically only have one free hand to field the kickball. That and the fact that you’re drinking hard cider.

Joey did his typical Joey thing. Our team strategy of kicking right at him never paid off as time after time he seemed to manage to make unbelieveable catches.

Later we saw the city hall building, and now I’m inspired to do more touristy things tomorrow. Tentative plans are Fisherman’s Wharf, Embarcadero, Coit Tower, Chinatown, and The Palace of the Legion of Honor (or however much of that I can fit in).

Tonight we had some amazing Mexican food on Mission St. I plan to continue to take advantage of the authentic offerings around here while I can.

After a trip through the Sierra Nevada on I-80, we got to our hotel just north of the San Francisco airport. I hopped a BART train to meet up with Joey at his place after he got off work. The BART gets a bad rap, but it’s actually a pretty nice system, especially compared with places like Philly or Chicago.

It was a really nice day, but I got to see some of the famous fog rolling in.

I got off the BART at one of the Mission Street stops and got to experience some of the flavor of the city on my walk into town. The districts in the city are all tiny and dense, and the ethnic makeup of the city can change from block to block.

I got to Joey’s place a bit early, so I walked up Bernal Heights, which is only a couple blocks from his place. Great views from the top, and the fog rolling over the top of the hills was fascinating.

We hung around at Joey’s apartment for a bit before heading into downtown. He found himself a nice, cosy place in a good location.

Downtown we ended up at a bar celebrating Oktoberfest, so we went along with it and bought boots of beer.

This morning, we woke up to a clear sky and decided it would be a great time to check out the Golden Gate Bridge. Joey had only driven across it in the past, so we decided to walk it instead. As we drove up, we saw the beginnings of fog coming into the bay.

The bridge is definitely quite the structure, and experiencing it with partial fog cover was actually really neat.

After the bridge and drive through town, we decided to play some tennis. We found courts near his place and played for about 2 hours (3 sets). It’s definitely a game that you have to play regularly to maintain. I hadn’t played in almost a year, and I realized I was trying too hard to play at the level I was at last summer when I couldn’t control my serve or backhand and dropped the first two sets pretty quickly. The third set was much more evenly matched after I brought the serve under a little more control and started worrying about getting the ball back across the net rather than going for kill shots. I still lost the set, but I broke Joey a couple times and had several games go to deuce 3,4,5…

Anyway, playing just makes me want to get back to playing more regularly.

Then we went back to his pad to watch the Ducks game (a blowout for the Ducks!) and I watched the pilot episode of Man Men, which Joey is raving about. Joey’s TV doubles as a computer (or it may be the other way around), but as I sit here typing this post I’m having to move my head left to right just to take in the enormity of the screen.

Our most recent entertainment came when Joey swatted a fly on the carpet, and then had Thomas eat it. Thomas is Joey’s robot vacuum. There was just something mildly hysterical about Thomas cheerily beeping to life and immediately sucking up the fly.

Tonight we’re going out again… somewhere or another. Then the big event tomorrow is Sloshball, a game of kickball involving alcoholic cider at second base.

Today was destined to be a rough day from the start. Not just any rough day, mind you. More like the type that kicks you, then kicks you when you’re down, then chews you up and spits you out and jumps up and down on your groin for a while.

It got to the point where Lyndsay and I couldn’t really do anything but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

It all started off innocently enough… some continental breakfast with an appetizing waffle covered in strawberries and whipped cream. I should have known it was too good to be true.

About 15 miles into our 600+ mile drive for the day, Nate was following behind me when suddenly I looked back and he was gone. I knew as soon as I heard “engine troubles” that the day’s original plan had just gone out the window. I knew as soon as I heard we were stopping at a truck center for service I was going to be staying behind with the truck, even before anyone else did.

So we sat for the better part of an hour and waited on a prognosis.

“Bad fuel injectors” was the confident answer to what was wrong, followed by “6 to 8 hours to fix it.” Well, Nate had plans to meet his parents and is on a time schedule to fly out of Salt Lake City, so obviously he had to keep going, and Molly just got lucky or tricked us into staying or something, but Lyndsay and I ended up switching trucks and stayed behind with the hobbled truck.

Lyndsay and I got some lunch and ended up sitting around in the Holiday Inn Express lobby since we couldn’t find anything better to do within walking distance. I came close to finishing The Kite Runner but stopped short, as this miserable excuse for a day wasn’t deserving of such a good book.

Then, a pleasant surprise. Little more than three hours later, the truck was ready to go. Good as new. A stroke of luck. Then with unfailing certainty, 15 miles back on the road and the truck lost power again. And again. We babied the truck along hoping to make it to Lincoln, Nebraska. Our hopes of catching up with Nate and Molly were pretty much shot. To add insult to injury and reinforce my feelings that something was very, very wrong with the day, a semi nearly broadsided me as it went to change lanes right alongside me.

And then after fueling up having made it to Lincoln, a sure sign that it was time to be done driving for the day. I was waiting at a stale green to turn left. The light went yellow, but something told me to not proceed through the intersection. I watched as a red SUV a good 5 seconds from the intersection with plenty of time to stop, start again, and then stop again before reaching the intersection cruised right through a ridiculously red light right about where the truck would have been had I decided to turn.

I laid on the horn for good measure, and watched in horror as I saw that a red truck had decided to make a u-turn from directly behind me and couldn’t see the oncoming red light offender because as you might imagine our truck is anything but transparent. I’m not particularly the swearing type, but a loud “oh shit” definitely came out at that point.

I don’t know how there wasn’t a collision, but I definitely had a slow-motion moment watching the SUV weave hard straight at a light pole, launching itself violently over the curb, somehow missing the red truck by mere inches and the light pole by even less. The SUV returned to the roadway and drove on, pretending nothing had happened.

This was about the point in the day where I started just shaking my head and wondering what would come next.

Well, next was truck service center #2. The weather seemed to fit. Dark and ominous.

The truck got left at the service center, with our reassurance of a solution being “we’ll hopefully get to it by midnight.” It’s 11:00 right now, and no call yet.

We got a hotel, got to the hotel via cab, and check in went fairly smoothly other than the high schooler checking us in while on the phone with her mom talking about court dates.

We decided heading downtown for some food and a movie might help unwind and would be a fairly fail-safe way to make sure we didn’t bring about our untimely deaths by something absurd like being charged by a rhinoceros (had it happened, I don’t think I would have been the least bit surprised). 7:30 Movie, so I called a cab at 6:00. “10 to 20 minutes” was the dispatcher’s reply. After waiting for half an hour, I called back. “They’re on their way” was the reply. An hour after the original call, I called back “Our monitor shows that cab is in route and should only be minutes away.” At 7:22, I calmly called back, ready to tell the dispatcher to cancel the cab, that his business practices were a disgrace, and I expected to have our cab ride back to the truck shop comped. And I probably would have thrown a mom joke in too. Except that at 7:22:15, the cab showed up.

With no time left for dinner, we hurried to the movie. We watched My Best Friend’s Girl, which I expected to be fairly light-hearted and funny. It was funny, but it was funny like watching someone get punched in the gut is funny. It was so off the wall, I couldn’t help but smack my forehead as the next bad sex joke was unveiled. Oh, and for some reason the filming style was more like an art film than a comedy.

After the movie we scramled to eat at Applebees before 10:00 when our cab was scheduled to pick us up (we thought pre-scheduling might give us a better chance of being on time, which amazingly enough it did).

Look Nate, sangria!

Then the cab ride back. A Prius pulls up. We get in. A fairly young woman is our driver. “Where are you guys from? What brings you to Lincoln? You don’t want to get stuck here long. I hate this place. I wish I wasn’t here. I’m from Annapolis. I came here because I’m broke. Lincoln is a good place to be broke. You work for Crocs? I have an idea for the owner of Starbucks, but I’m not telling him until he signs paperwork. Oh, they should sell Crocs at Starbucks. Where do they make Crocs now?”

“Uh, all over really. China, Mexico…”

“Yes, but where do they make them? Like where are the factories? Where do they get that rubber stuff? Or plastic? Whatever. Do Crocs make flip flops? I want to see them when you get out. Most people pay with vouchers, not cash. And they don’t tip. People around here are like that. Bad tippers and cheapskates. Don’t forget your reciept!”

Whew. We made it. Under normal circumstances I would feel safe in my hotel room from the absurdity that is today, but I’m not letting down my guard yet.

Tonight I completely expect a phone call in the middle of the night determining our fate of whether or not we’ll be able to get back on the road tomorrow.

Tomorrow can’t get here soon enough.

We drove 670 miles today, and that’s pretty much all we did. Besides the time spent driving, for the most part I just read.

First I finished off the last couple hundred pages of Total Control, the David Baldacci book I’ve been reading. It was a fast-paced read with lots of action.

Then I read the first half of The Kite Runner. Stephen read it first and passed it off to Molly, and now it’s my turn. It’s a great read so far, and Hosseini puts it very well when he writes, “sad stories make good books.”

Tomorrow, I expect to finish that book and perhaps start on the next one.

A side note: The new Bond film coming out in November looks to be really good based on the trailer.

You probably didn’t know yesterday was Constitution Day did you? We didn’t either. More on that later.

First up, Philly chese steaks! The real kind. With Cheez Whiz.

Then we wandered around downtown and saw some interesting stuff. Not sure what to make of this…

But it seems like someone has a fake pet spotted leopard.

Yes, but do they sell BEER?

As interesting as this next picture is, no picture could really capture the enormous amount of random objects crammed into one large garden of artwork. If you can call it that.

The rest of the afternoon was spent reliving part of my history, part of national history, and part of the movie National Treasure.

We unwittingly took a tour of Independence Hall at 3:30PM – and found out while standing in the hall at 4:00PM that the Constitution signing had occurred 221 years ago at 4:00PM. Really kind of an overwhelming thought to be standing there at that time.

Nate had been reliving moments from the movie National Treasure all afternoon while Molly and I struggled to remember the scenes he was describing in vivid detail, so Nate got the movie and we decided it needed to be watched.

We didn’t want to have to cram around a laptop, so I ended up in the back of the truck in the dark digging for our DVD player we use at events. It looked something like this:

After the movie and getting to see numerous scenes shot where we had just been in Philly (and in DC for that matter), I went for some night geocaching with Stephen.

We only went 1 for 3 on caches, but it was fun to wander around in a park in the dark.