Dyepot, Teapot

Lucas and I are on our annual Thanksgiving Vegas Vacation right now. We spent the weekend in downtown Las Vegas, but most of this week we’ll be in Arizona, with two nights back downtown at the end.

I’m feeling a little sour about our first night’s accommodations. Shortly after we checked in at the Golden Gate Hotel, someone tried to run a test transaction with a company I’ve never heard of on the credit card I used to make the reservation. Fascinating old hotel, but I’d rather stay someplace that doesn’t cause me to spend my morning on the phone with a fraud department.

Saturday we had a really wonderful dinner at Bouchon. Fabulous food, friendly service, entertaining people watching at adjacent tables. I want to go back… as soon as I can afford it.

Our plan from here is a Route 66 adventure, Ash Fork to Topock, returning back to Lucas’ mom’s house in Golden Valley for Thanksgiving. Rusty abandoned gas stations await.

I’ve been home since Wednesday night, so it’s probably time to finish posting about the road trip and move on to something else.

Sunday night I had dinner in the Mission district, first tacos at Pancho Villa, then a dessert crepe at Ti Couz.

Monday morning was spent on laundry, as mentioned before. Then in the afternoon I headed to SOMA to see Citizen Space. It’s a nice office, comfortable place to catch up on email, and they seem very open to people dropping by.

After that, I took the cable car up to Lombard St.

Twisty as advertised.

Then back downtown to do a little shopping. I’ve been having some pants problems. I can’t find an exact duplicate of the ones I like that wore out, and I hate ordering things online only to discover that the sizing isn’t as expected. It’s really irritating how many places don’t stock their full size range in the store.

The Old Navy on Market has not just the XL and XXL sizes I’ve seen here in Portland, but an actual Women’s Plus section of the store, all the way up to 4X. They even had larger mannequins for the displays. So now I have two pairs of reasonably comfortable pants. The fit around the waist is a little weird, but not enough to be irritating.

Tuesday we started the drive back north, but first I had a couple hours free to explore Golden Gate Park. I spent most of it in the Botanical Garden.

Laurie and I loaded back into the car and started north along highway 101.

This went fairly smoothly, though we had some trouble getting back on the highway after stopping for food in Santa Rosa. The highway entrances and exits aren’t paired, and there are no signs directing you back to 101. Instead, they expect you to know the area well enough to follow the signs for highway 12, understanding that it overlaps with 101 through town. This is not very friendly to people just passing though.

We made it to the redwoods by dark, and camped at Richardson Grove State Park.

Scenic, but noisy. The year-round camping area is well within earshot of the highway.

Most of the rest of the trip was driving and driving and driving. With a couple of small detours, including an elk viewing area.

I had a really good time over the week I was gone, and I’m really happy that Laurie decided to take a road trip and asked if anyone wanted to come along. It was much fun.

And now I’m home, with too much to get done, and a really annoying cold I picked up at the hostel. Achoo.

I didn’t write a post yesterday, so now I have two days to catch up on. This might be long and picture-heavy.

I’m writing from a laundromat on O’Farrell called Joey’s. They serve ice cream, coffee, and sausages. The laundry prices seem competitive. And there’s wifi (yay!).

A few highlights from Saturday:

I started my day at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market.

Then I took the streetcar to Pier 39.

A few piers down from there, I found a submarine.

Also:

Coin-operated gizmos.

My evening’s entertainment was dinner at Edinburgh Castle, which is a pub that serves fish & chips, delivered in paper wrappings from a little take-out place around the corner. There I met Derri, a canned-foods journalist from London, who was hanging out in SF for a couple of days after a conference. She was disappointed that the bartender had never heard of HP sauce or mushy peas. The fish & chips were authentically bland, but they have a decent selection of beer on tap.

Moving along to Sunday: my general plan was to go look at the bay some more, then wander through Japantown for a bit. The first part went as expected.

Fishermen, seagulls, a view of Alcatraz …

and people out for a swim?

This was about when I started wishing I could stay in town an extra week, go kayaking, check out SFMOMA, hang out at the beach getting sunburnt (oh wait already did that one). I’m on my last full day and there are still all sorts of things I’d like to do.

Next: Japantown. I had noticed a couple of things mentioning the Cherry Blossom Festival, but somehow I got it into my head that the festivities weren’t for another week.

I’m very happy to have been wrong about that. I spent two hours sitting around and watching the parade. There were kimonos. There were swords. There were cosplay outfits.

I even saw the mayor riding a Segway. (He hopped out of his car to ask the parade volunteer if he could try it, then zipped around the group in front of him at high speed. His security guys looked a little nervous about this.)

It was quite a party.

P.S. Can anyone tell me about the shrines several groups were carrying, like the one above? It seemed to be related to celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Osaka-San Francisco sister city relationship. There were about 6 different groups carrying these, each chanting something different, but since I don’t speak Japanese, I don’t know what they were saying.

I’ve traveled enough to learn that I need to walk around in a new place to get the geography clear in my head, because otherwise I feel lost and uncomfortable. So yesterday I walked from the hostel to Chinatown and back, then around again through the city center area. This worked; I feel like I know where I am now.

Chinatown was sort of under- and overwhelming at the same time. Grant Ave. had clusters of gawking tourists, cheap import shops, some interesting collectibles and antiques, and a lot of restaurants with people outside waving menu flyers.

Stockton has a different sort of crowdedness: little old Chinese men and women buying fresh fish and roast chickens and unidentifiable (to me) dried things. I had planned to get lunch in the area, but after wandering around a bit I realized I had no way to work out which restaurants were any good (having failed to write this info down before heading out), so instead I wandered into a bakery and bought a couple of buns. The yellow bean and ginger one was really interesting, but I couldn’t finish it. The unfilled pineapple bun worked out better.

Afterward, more wander wander until I was tired enough to come back to the hostel for a nap.

In the evening I met up with some of the Podcast Hotel crowd at the JPG Magazine gallery opening/party.

We hung out at the gallery for a while, then carpooled over to Velvet Cantina in the Mission for dinner. Lots of fun conversation with John, Alex, and Marshall about social media, reputation systems, and general internetty stuff.

Today’s plan is to go check out the market by the Ferry Building, then head up to Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39, after which I will probably want another nap and a shower. And then maybe I’ll crash the Podcast Hotel wrap party.

We made it to San Francisco safely. I am tired. Too much car.

But look, on the way we went to the beach:

We camped at the Umpqua Lighthouse State Park Wednesday night, then Thursday cut back over to I-5, and headed south until we were here. There may have been a little difficulty finding Highway 505 that resulted in going back over the same stretch of I-5 a couple times because you can only get to the entrance heading south. Maybe.

And now I’m at the City Center HI. We got in around 10:30 or 11. Slept okay, but the radiator in the room makes weird sloshy noises and I may have to try earplugs. There’s a lounge with tables and many outlets.

In a little while I’ll go see Chinatown.

I’m taking advantage of my really flexible no-office schedule to accompany a friend on a road trip to San Francisco. Neat things about this: I can’t remember the last time I decided to travel on ~3 days notice (and pulled it off), I’ve never been to SF, people I know from Portland will also be there for Podcast Hotel so maybe I can figure out how to meet up with them without paying the $50/day event registration fee, I’m bringing my camera (of course), and I expect to have ample access to wifi.

My plans involve a fair amount of sightseeing, so let me know if there’s anything I really should see or do (already have Chinatown, sea lions, that really twisty street…). Brewpubs? Bookstores? Bakeries? Yarn/fabric/etc?

I’ll be back a week from tomorrow, but expect to hear from me before then.

Tomorrow morning, Lucas and I will be driving up to Seattle for Norwescon, copies of Yog’s Notebook in hand. This is my first sf convention in five years, so I’m excited. Lucas has never been to one at all, aside from a brief stop at Orycon in 2003 (he attended one filk concert and the Geeks Without Borders room party, IIRC). This Norwescon should be particularly neat, because the Guest of Honor is Kim Stanley Robinson, one of my absolute favorite writers ever.

There’ll be at least a couple of us using Twitter to keep in touch, so I’m curious to see how that goes. I don’t normally forward updates to my phone (except the direct messages).

I’m impatient. Is it tomorrow yet?

I finished uploading pictures from our Thanksgiving travels to Flickr. The best way to browse it is at http://flickr.com/photos/ame/sets/. The Arizona/Nevada and Grand Canyon sets are new, and there are new pictures in the Vegas and outdoors ones too. I’m really pleased with how some of these came out, so go take a look.

We survived the return trip, airport and all. It was crowded but not terrible. I managed to bring an illicit 4 oz. bottle of contact lens solution through security at both airports by sticking it in with the other “liquids and gels” and not doing anything to draw attention to myself. Alaska Airlines is a massive improvement over America West, which was last year’s Vegas trip airline. Alaska: friendly and clean. America West: planes that look like they should have been retired 30 years ago, and so little leg room that my knees touched the seat in front of me. I’m only 5′6″, so if I don’t have enough leg room, the place must have been designed for midgets or children. Plus the terminal Alaska flies from is newer and has multiple coffee stands.

I’m in the process of pulling all the photos off my camera to load to Flickr. Stay tuned.

I’ve been using my Sunday afternoon to catch up on tech blogs, which reminded me of this: there are lots of ways to make a website not very useful, and if it’s something you might need to access from the road, it would be smart to make it mobile-friendly. AAA makes you enter a zip code before you can get any useful information (like the location of their closest office), and the submit button on the form doesn’t work in my phone’s browser, so instead of trying to pick up a free-to-members map, we ended up navigating Arizona by a combination of Google Earth, following road signs, and asking for directions. (Yes, I know we could have purchased a map in any truck stop or grocery store, but I’m cheap, we mostly knew where we were going, and for some reason the rental car didn’t come with anything of the sort.)

I’m just saying, if you’re thinking about doing something really clever or flashy with your website, some of us would like you to consider asking: How badly will this screw over someone with minimal internet access? Am I encouraging people to go elsewhere? There is much to be said in favor of plain old text. Especially for people who’re traveling in places where dial-up is more common than wifi. A cell phone with a web browser can only handle so much.

Thanksgiving is over, but right now I’m very thankful for wifi and doughnuts and the rumor that I could get online from the Krispy Kreme on Fremont St. (downtown Vegas, under the big light-up roof) turning out to be entirely correct.

The actual holiday was okay. Let’s stick with “no one got food poisoning, I had the sense to leave the room when they started arguing about who sits where, and northern Arizona is very pretty”. A couple years ago I had a post-holidays dinner so I could cook everything the way I wanted it, because the actual holiday meals (with my family) had been kind of a bust, and I’m thinking about doing that again this year. Maybe I’ll roast something (duck? turkey? lamb? I’m pretty sure I can find happy local farm versions of all of those without too much trouble).

Lucas’ sister has a really nice recipe for stuffing. She makes it with big bread cubes and sausage and cranberries and apples (I fed the sausagey bits to Lucas), and I want to try copying it sometime.

I bet you’ve been waiting to see my pictures of the Grand Canyon, so here you go.

It’s big.

You probably knew that.

We saw a family of deer just hanging out, a few hundred feet from the trail. Didn’t seem to mind us at all.

Lucas and I managed to get a couple of “look, we’re standing in front of a big tourist landmark” pictures without falling in.

The sun set while we were on the train heading back to Williams. Click on the picture above to see it full size (sunsets are prettier that way).

We’re down to our last full day in Vegas. This is okay with me. I’m feeling like the weekend in Laughlin followed by another full weekend in downtown Vegas might be a little too much old people at slot machines. I’m not that into gambling in general, I just like the cheap drinks and people watching and all the rest of the spectacle. But I miss my kitties, and too much sitting around watching other people get wasted and blow their money makes me feel restless to actually do something constructive. So we’ll finish off by wandering around the strip for a while today (it’s really a different crowd and kind of show than downtown), and then come back here for the rest of the night. Maybe I’ll try my luck at blackjack.

I hope you all had a nice turkey day.