Los Angeles (Day 9): Home again!!!

So finally after nine days of driving, walking, busing, and exploring, I've made it back to my home in Los Angeles. Like always, it's nice to be home after a vacation. Anyway, I thought I would compile a reflective list of the places I went and the things I saw!

• Portland Oregon:
• Memorable experience: Rocco's Pizza in the wonderfully eclectic neighborhood of where downtown transitions into residential
• Like LA: Laid-back residents who can be extremely approachable and friendly!
• Unlike LA: You can actually see the hills surrounding the city
• Future visits?: I could see spending a solid week up here.
  
• Vancouver, British Columbia
• Memorable experience: Biking Stanley Park!!!
  
• Like LA: Bustling and crazy night-life scene that attracts a young crowd.
  
• Unlike LA: You can actually walk to places you'd like to go to.
  
• Future visits?: It'd be a great place to spend a summer doing an internship in (not that I could see myself doing an internship ever... :) )
• Seattle, Washington
• Memorable experience: Volunteer Park / Capitol Hill
  
• Like LA: It's easy to get lost in the tourist traps that lurk in major areas through this city.
  
• Unlike LA: Downtown actually meets the Puget sound, creating a beautiful city center right on the waterfront.
  
• Future visits?: Again, maybe a week sometime.
• San Francisco, California
• Memorable experience: Haight-Ashbury / Golden Gate Park
  
• Like LA: Another California city with a "California" reputation, a laid-back artistic community and a large business and professional population.
  
• Unlike LA: I can walk around in the summer without getting sweaty.
  
• Future visits?: This would be a cool place to maybe work in a hostel during some future summer. Just a random thought

Anyway, thanks for reading all these postings of my road trip. I'll continue to post for the rest of my summer (which comes to a screeching halt this Monday), and then decide whether I want to (or have time for) a personal blog and a professional blog. We'll see!

San Francisco (Day 8): The epitome of laziness

One of the biggest challenges of major league baseball executives has to be how to keep 30,000 fans (minus the 5,000 who have gone to the concession stand to buy beer) happy during the long breaks between innings in baseball games. One typical diversion is to stage a pseudo-race between cars, trucks, or even sausages. The fans will arbitrarily choose a racer of their choice and frantically cheer it on to victory (or helpless defeat). Anyway, this evening at the Oakland Coliseum, I had the opportunity to cheer on my choice of white, orange, or blue dots as they races around a race track. I know it's difficult to program computer animation for a stadium jumbo-tron, but dots??? C'mon! You could have at least tried! Not only this, but I was definitely watching baseball being played in what is truly a football stadium. My students would call this discrepancy "bootleg" (using less adolescent jargon, this term could be translated "makeshift", "substitute", etc...). Anyway, I had a great experience, even though the A's couldn't pull off a victory. And with that, my road trip is nearing completion and I leave for Los Angeles tomorrow morning! For as much fun as I've had this past week, I'm looking forward to being home and even looking forward a little to beginning planning for my kids this coming year!

Also, enjoy my final pictures from San Francisco here!

San Francisco (Day 8): Goin' back to California

So I finally made it to the last stop on my road trip vacation, the great city of San Francisco. The drive here was long, extremely tiresome, but not without it's rewards. I saw a minivan from Washington with a New York Mets license plate frame, a UHAUL van with a giant advertisement for Oneonta, NY (my hometown), the Newsboys' truck full of their gear (they were one of my favorite bands when I was a teenager), and an amazing sunset over Northern California.
Today so far has been fairly exhausting as well, not helped by the fact that I had to get up at 6am to move my car to avoid getting a parking ticket. After finding a great secret parking spot (invaluable information provided by a very helpful hostel staff), I took a bus down to the Haight-Ashbury district, then headed over to Golden-Gate Park, followed by another bus ride over to Coit Tower for an amazing view (of everything except the fog-covered Golden Gate Bridge, of course). This evening I think I'm going to head over to Oakland to check out the Oakland Coliseum and the A's. Detroit is in town and I don't really care who wins, but it'll be cool to check out the stadium.
By the way, as the hostel staff told me briefly about S.F., they mentioned the population was 750,000, a number that seemed all too familiar to me, although I couldn't quite place it. Well, during one of my bus rides today, as my mind wandered to thoughts of next week, it finally hit me. The number of students in the Los Angeles school district is equal to the population of San Francisco!!! Yikes... That should put a perspective on how monstrous LAUSD has become!

WCRT: T - 18 hours!!!

My bags are packed. My car has been serviced. I'm ready to go! Tomorrow at "o-dark-thirty", I head out in my amazing Honda Civic into the vastness that is the Pacific Northwest. The major stops include Portland, Vancouver (Canada), Seattle, and San Francisco. I anticipate the entire trip to take approximately 9 days, filled with exploring, relaxing and taking in the amazing beauty that lies in stark contrast to the urban jungle in which I currently live! Luckily, the longest drive is the early in the trip (the first day), which will be the fifteen hour trek from Los Angeles to Portland, OR. However, having google-mapped (which is a surpirsing new verb to enter the English language) the route, it is no longer than the drive from Central NY to Central Iowa, a journey that our family undertook on more than one occasion growing up! Anyway, there will be lots more posts in the upcoming week letting you all know what I'm up to there in the NW!