I’ll be in Maine (near Portland) for the weekend for a quick family visit. On Saturday, some friends and I have pulled together an informal reunion:
WHAT: Informal Greely HS Class of 2000 Get-Together
WHERE: Gritty McDuff’s (Where else? – 396 Fore Street, Portland ME, 207.772.2739)
WHEN: 7:00 p.m., Saturday, August 20
Michigan was very relaxing, but I’m back in D.C. See all 42 trip photos.
I spent today touring around San Francisco with Emily and then met up with a couple more high school friends who have made their way out here for dinner at Luna Park in the Mission district. I once heard San Francisco was a city with five separate interlocking transit systems and I’m beginning to understand why – today I rode BART (which is eerily similar to WMATA’s Metrorail) and a MUNI bus, but also saw lots of Trolleys, one MUNI line which is surface light rail, and heard about the underground MUNI lines. I’ll be exploring some of those a bit more tomorrow. Of course, my friends gripe about how BART closes much too early – around midnight all week. 
I am reminded of when WMATA first instituted with the late hours on Metrorail on weekends in D.C. – when they did it, ridership exceeded expectations. I think it also makes sense even if there’s not a lot of people from a public safety perspective – it helps prevent drunk driving.
I uploaded my photos to the Flickr trip set – probably the most interesting bunch yet. Tomorrow more exploring, and lunch with Jackson West of SFist.
I just uploaded some photos from yesterday and today to my summer tour photo set on Flickr. Last night I went to Society, a bar in Pacific Beach on Garnet Avenue. The whole strip was filled with an interesting collection of businesses, many apparently independent. Today we went to Hoboken Pizza for lunch, went to the beach for a while, and grabbed sushi at Japan House for dinner before I had to head to the airport. I took a dip in the Pacific just to say I had on my trip, but with all the seaweed and overcast skies I didn’t stay in long. My flight to San Francisco has been delayed, so I’m passing the time catching up on the computer.
Fisher insisted I include this photo of the two of us, and I snapped this photo of a Darth Vader stencil to add to my collection.
I just uploaded the first batch of photos from my summer trip to Flickr – you can check them out in this set. My flight to San Diego was delayed by almost 2 hours due to thunderstorms in the area – the photo to the left shows people watching as a downpour passed through. I didn’t mind the wait because the new Southwest terminal at BWI is really nice and the food court area was overlooking the gates instead of down the hall. When I got into San Diego I went to a restaurant and club called Ole Madrid in what they call the “gas light district” near downtown San Diego. Although the district is small it was packed – lots of people coming in from the suburbs.
Today we went to Tijuana and and Rosarito, a Mexican vacation town just south of San Diego. In Rosarito there were a number of spring break-type clubs and bars blaring music with aggressive staff outside hawking $5 all-you-can-drink bracelets. As always I was traveling with an eye for urban development – I noticed San Diego’s mass transit system goes right to the border so you can walk through the entry point and hop on a trolley to downtown San Diego. 
Of course, the only major city I’m visiting on this trip without any fixed rail mass transit (or effective public buses) is Detroit, however the transit bill Congress just passed contains $100 million for a study on rapid transit between Ann Arbor and Detroit. I say: quit studying it and get busy – just make sure your route passes through Detroit Metro Airport. ArborUpdate also covered the news.
Tonight I’ll be going out in Pacific Beach, and tomorrow night I am flying up to San Francisco.
This Friday, I’ll depart on a three-city tour to visit friends and get out of D.C. My itinerary puts me in San Diego on August 5, 6, and 7th, San Francisco and Oakland on August 8, 9 and 10th, and on a lake “up north” in Michigan for a few days before returning to D.C. I’ll be covering 5,500 miles in nine days in a trip that includes six separate flights. My budget for the entire trip is $1,000, and thanks in part to the discount airlines I was able to purchase all the flights for just over $520.
From the road I’ll hopefully be posting some photos and observations, trying my hand at trip-blogging. These first two photos of San Diego were produced by Google Earth.
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