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!

Seattle (Day 6): Goodnight Seattle

So one of the most amazing places to watch a sunset in Seattle is secluded Volunteer Park, which in addition to being home of the Seattle Asian Art Museum, has a picturesque reservoir (if that is even possible). Either way, the view was fantastic, and afterwards, I found myself headed down to the Capital Hill area (which is a college-age type neighborhood servicing Seattle University). Anyway, I'm off to bed before another long drive tomorrow, the final city, San Francisco.

Also, pictures of Seattle are now available here. Enjoy!

Seattle (Day 6): It's all about your attitude...

New York has its delis, Chicago has its pizza, Los Angeles has great Mexican food, and Seattle has, well, its coffee. I suppose it is alright to be elitist about something you do very well. And I guess it's just about the only city where you can walk into a Starbucks and still feel the pride of buying local. Having thus successfully avoided the chain so far, I grabbed an iced coffee from a local cafe after a full day of walking. After sleeping in until about 8:30, I headed downtown, whereupon I stumbled into a Steinway shop. For those of you know what item Steinway sells, you can understand why I was such a sucker and walked in. Anyway, the salesman was extremely friendly and offered me the opportunity to try out their finest model, whose selling price was....get this....$107,000!!!! Wow. It was probably the most expensive item I've ever touched! Later in the morning I boarded the Elliot Bay Ferry to Bainbridge Island, a small island across the bay from Seattle. The island was not terribly interesting, but the boat ride provided spectacular views of the city!!! Following that, I walked through Pioneer Square, Pike's Market, and Belltown. Right now, I'm pretty tired so I'm relaxing a bit before heading up to Volunteer Park for sunset tonight!

Seattle (Day 5): Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

So who else remembers growing up with the computer game (and television show) Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a game in which you would use clues to determine the geographic location of a major theft (the object of which typically involved something literally "un-stealable", like a building, a lake, or a park). Anyway, it sure looks like one of Carmen's henchmen has stolen and transported Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall, and plopped it down right next to the Seattle Space Needle, only to have it melt a little in the summer sun. Well, it turns out that this awfully familiar looking architecture, the Experience Music Project, was in fact designed by the same architect (hmm....since I'm feeling kind of saucy, let's do this...for a free coffee, my treat, be the first to post a reply naming the architect). Anyway, EMP was fairly disappointing, albeit another tourist trap of sorts that only succeeded in it's exhibits of Northwest music, the history of electric guitars, and a memorial to Jimi Hendrix. Honestly, it wasn't all that impressive, and I couldn't possibly envision going to it more than once (unlike a certain museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. where I could fantasize about attending every year and enjoy it fully each time!!!).

Road Trip Photos

Having basically finished my stays in Portland and Vancouver, I've now uploaded my photos to the web! You can view them as slide-shows, print them, or even download them to your hard drive. Just please don't sell them on eBay (unless you offer me at least 45% commission).

Portland Photos (click here)

Vancouver Photos (click here)