Thoughts before the big journey begins...

It's Friday afternoon, August 31 -- later tonight, we'll be on a plane to Buenos Aires. I'm excited for the big trip to finally begin... I feel like we've been planning and shopping constantly and I'm ready to finally get into the trip. Before we leave, a few parting thoughts:

- It looks like when we return, we'll be moving to the Bay Area. After our California trip, we were having a really hard time deciding, because both cities were really great. When Carrie went back to Chicago, we had a conversation with people at work and it seemed like the Bay Area was what more people were leaning towards. While I feel bad about not going to San Diego, I'm excited about the Bay Area and I'm looking forward to being able to visit Dave and Brodie in San Diego much easier.

- This month has flown by... I had initially envisioned it as us doing some trip preparation, but mostly spending time exploring New England and relaxing. Instead, somehow things just flew by and we're leaving tonight!

- If you ever have the time and the logistics make sense, I highly recommend getting "sleeper" accomodations on an Amtrak train at least once in your life.

- The JD Drew era for the Boston Red Sox is not going over well.

- The new Miss Fairchild album is fantastic. Look to www.missfairchild.com for tour dates in your area!

Hopefully Carrie and I will be able to check in on the blog semi-regularly when we're in South America. From what we've been reading, most hotels / hostels have computers with internet access, and even smaller towns have internet cafes. Remember to enter your email address in the upper-right hand corner of the blog main page so that you receive notices whenever we update the blog. And feel free to email us personally -- It will be good to hear from people back home while we're so far away.

Hasta luego!

Dan

San Diego and Getting There

After our stay in the Bay Area, we took an Amtrak train to Santa Barbara. Driving from San Francisco to Santa Barbara takes about 5 hours, but Amtrak takes at least 9 hours, and often more due to delays. Since it was such a long ride, we decided to upgrade to a 2 person room. The room consisted of two easy chairs facing each other with a small fold out table in the middle. The chairs can slide out to form a twin-sized bed, and above that another bed can fold down from the ceiling. Most importantly, upgrading to the suite meant we had access to all meals being served in the dining car (yay free food!). Since trains are often delayed, they couldn’t say for sure which meals we would get. We were supposed to get breakfast and lunch, but due to an hour delay, got lunch and dinner instead.

I spent the first few hours of the ride sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s baseball game and then it was time for lunch. Space is at a premium on the train so we were seated with another couple. This arrangement was actually really nice because everyone was very nice and it was fun to hear other people’s stories. For lunch we sat with a retired couple from Oklahoma who were taking trains literally all over the US. When we told them we were from Chicago, the husband told us he didn’t like Chicago. I asked why, and he said because it has a lot of low-clearance roads (he used to be a truck driver). He also asked Dan and me how long we’d been married, and we told him we weren’t. He said that if we liked, he could marry us right on the train!

That afternoon there was a wine and cheese tasting in the parlour car (lounge only accessible to people who had a reserved room). The things we tasted weren’t that exciting, but it was fun chatting with more people, and watching the train curve around the countryside.

The last few hours of the trip were the most scenic, with most of the tracks on a cliff overlooking untouched beaches. Before we knew it, we were in Santa Barbara. Train travel is very relaxing and if you have the time and are okay with delays that may double the length of the trip, I highly recommend it.

We had one day in Santa Barbara to hang out with my parents and take care of a couple things. Sadly my camera lens stopped functioning towards the end of the train ride, but miraculously, I had bought my camera exactly 355 days before it broke so the one year warranty was still good! Even more miraculously, with all the chaos of leaving Chicago, I just happened to put my camera warranty and receipt in a box we shipped to Santa Barbara (I had originally put it in a bag for the car ride to Groton, MA but remember incorrectly thinking that the warranty was up, so I may as well ship the instructions/warranty/etc to SB since there is no way I’d need it before getting back from South America). The camera was successfully fixed (yay for Panasonic for holding true on their warranty) and is currently being shipped back to Groton, MA.

The next morning we were back on an Amtrak train headed for San Diego. This was only a 5 hour ride (driving is about 3 hours). We took the 7 am train, so it was pretty empty and I could lounge out and take a nap. Around LA I woke up because the train started filling up with LA-types. However, I passed the time by making friends with a little inch worm we found crawling on the window. I put him in my leftover carrot bag, intending to let him out when we got to San Diego. However, I put him in my purse and forgot about him until a few days later. Fortunately, there had been a few droplets of water in the bag, so he managed to survive, and I found him a new home a safe distance away from Dave and Brodie’s house.

I had intended to write about our San Diego trip in this post, but I got a little carried away with Amtrak tales. I guess I’ll have to save San Diego for my next post.

Dan's Guide to San Diego!

Hello again! After a pleasant stay with Carrie's parents in Santa Barbara, it was off to San Diego. We had a really great time staying with my good friend Dave and his wife Brodie, and last night we finally got back to Massachusetts. Carrie and I haven't yet made our final decision on where we're going to live next... The good news is that we've confirmed that we really can't go wrong with this decision -- both places were great.

Carrie will once again cover the fun stuff of what we did each day in San Diego, but I get the task of providing the San Diego guide, using the more analytical approach. My Bay Area post was pretty long, so I tried to shorten this one, but it still came out pretty thorough.

BASIC GEOGRAPHY OF SAN DIEGO

San Diego is somewhat unique in that the downtown is not at the center of the city in terms of north / south. Once you go south of downtown, you are very close to Mexico. The airport is right downtown, with beaches west and northwest of downtown. If you head inland and north, you hit neighborhoods like Hillcrest (the "Boystown" of San Diego), and then further north into vast residential neighborhoods, in addition to office parks. One thing I noticed about San Diego is that it really seems small geographically -- nothing is that far from anything else, and since there are lots of freeways, you can get from place to place fairly quickly and without too much traffic. OK - Let's get into the neighborhoods.

THE BEACHES (Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, Ocean Beach, La Jolla)

GEOGRAPHY
Along the West Coast, from south to north, the beaches go Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Pacific Beach, La Jolla. There are more beaches to the north, but we did not make it up that far. Ocean Beach is basically west of downtown, whereas the rest are northwest of downtown. Mission Beach is a narrow strip of land bordered by the ocean to the west and Mission Bay to the east. The larger Pacific Beach has more land east of the Ocean, as Mission Bay and Mission Beach border it to the South. North of Pacific Beach is La Jolla, which has beaches and some cliffs on the ocean.

PEOPLE
The people you find at the beaches are different for each area. Ocean Beach was described to us as being the more "hippie" beach neighborhood, and we did observe that to an extent. Our friends also warned us that there were more homeless in Ocean Beach. The ages were quite varied. Once you move into Mission and Pacific Beaches, you run into a younger, party oriented crowd. Carrie and I felt that we might be a little bit too old for the neighborhood, and we became turned off by the constant catcalls from drunk guys driving by in pickup trucks. As you head into the more upscale La Jolla, we found more tourists and older, wealthier residents. My thought was that this neighborhood was a little too ritzy for my taste.

CULTURE / THINGS TO DO
In the beach neighborhoods, when the weather is always perfect, the beach is definitely the place to be. The ocean is great for swimming (although a little cold in the winter, we hear), and the sand at the beach is fantastic. Alcohol is allowed at beaches, which appears to be quite popular in Pacific Beach especially. Assuming your apartment has a balcony or a yard, you can barbecue every day, 365 days a year. There are also restaurants and bars. The Pacific Beach bars are similar to Wrigleyville after Cubs games, except people are wearing bathing suits and there is more outdoor seating. The restaurants vary from cheap fast food to upscale. There are some hotel / beach club type places that have live music, but we didn't check those out as much.

WEATHER
After hearing so much about the "perfect" San Diego weather, I was curious to see if it could live up to the hype. It did. Every single day, there is a blue sky with some occasional floating clouds. The beaches get a few more clouds, but they quickly burn off. The temperature during the day is always in the 70s, but could occasionally float into the 80s on "hot" days. At night, the weather cools into the 60s, and is comfortable for sleeping. I've been told that it can occasionally get into the 50s in the winter, and it even rains for a few days in January.

GETTING AROUND
This is Southern California, so cars are the primary mode of transportation. However, if you live in the beach neighborhood and want to go to the beach, walking is usually doable, and riding a bike is easy. There does appear to be a bus system that accesses the beaches, but we did not try it, and it does not seem heavily used. For getting to Downtown and other neighborhoods, the I-5 is the westernmost freeway and basically your primary option from the Beaches.

SPORTS
I guess there could be Frisbee on the beach -- but the pro sports teams are inland. Since one can get around San Diego pretty quickly, the sports teams are not all that far away.

OVERALL
San Diego's beaches are beautiful, and well worth going to. However, I'm not sure that I'd want to live in the beach towns themselves. Pacific Beach is too "frat party" like, and La Jolla is too ritzy. Ocean Beach might be a possibility, but we'd need to spend a little more time there to know for sure.

DOWNTOWN / LITTLE ITALY / HILLCREST / BANKER'S HILL

GEOGRAPHY
From the beaches, head inland and a little south, and you'll hit the more "urban" San Diego. Downtown is south and west, and has the airport, tall buildings, and the like. Little Italy is basically part of downtown. Banker's Hill is just north of downtown, and is a fairly residential neighborhood with a canyon running through it. Hillcrest is also north of downtown and inland from Banker's Hill. Downtown is generally east of the I-5 and south of the I-8. The very large and pretty Balboa Park borders nearly all of these neighborhoods to the east.

PEOPLE
These neighborhoods are more urban, so you'll find a more diverse crowd here. This is also a somewhat more intellectual crowd than the beaches. Downtown is primarily the financial / big business / hotel district, so you'll see plenty of tourists and business people here. Hillcrest is the openly gay-friendly neighborhood. Banker's Hill seemed like it would be home to professionals, but we didn't really get a sense of the people there.

CULTURE / THINGS TO DO
Downtown has the Gaslamp District, which is full of restaurants and bars. There is also live music downtown. Little Italy obviously has tons of Italian restaurants. Balboa Park is nearby, which contains lots of open green space. Hillcrest contains plenty of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops.

WEATHER
Same as the beaches, except even fewer clouds.

GETTING AROUND

Downtown has a trolley system (pictured above), but its scope is fairly limited. We rode the trolley from the Amtrak station to the airport Enterprise rent-a-car location, and the ride was pleasant enough. The fare varies depending on how far you go, and what's interesting is that paying the fare is based on the honors system. We were told that occasionally attendants will randomly come on a trolley and check for tickets, and if you don't have a ticket, you pay an enormous fine (~$80-$100). Within Hillcrest, things are very walkable. One can also walk from Banker's Hill to Downtown or Hillcrest, or Little Italy to Downtown, etc, although the walking distances are longer. Since the weather is always nice, long walks aren't necessarily a bad thing. Biking also seems like it could work, although you're often sharing the road with cars. If you are more pressed for time, the car is certainly the primary method of transportation.

SPORTS
The Padres (baseball) play downtown in the brand new Petco Park. Unfortunately they were on the road while we were visiting, so we didn't get a chance to enter the park. The Chargers (football) play in Qualcomm Stadium, which is north and east of downtown, but is easily accessible by many freeways. Unfortunately, there is no pro basketball in San Diego.

OVERALL
Provided appropriate housing options were available, I could definitely see myself living in these parts. Little Italy and Downtown are fairly expensive and more "high-rise" like, so those might not be good options. Hillcrest and Banker's Hill seem like better and more affordable options.

UTC / CLAREMONT / TIERRASANTA

GEOGRAPHY
Head north of downtown, and more inland from the beaches. UTC is just east of La Jolla, Claremont is a little more east of Pacific Beach, and Tierrasanta is further east. The Beaches are anywhere from 3-10 miles away from these areas. Things become a little more spread out and suburban here. The residential neighborhoods tend to be more subdivision like, and there are more office parks. In terms of residential areas, Tierrasanta seemed very appealing with more green / tree-lined streets and more space for your money. UTC tends to have more condo-like units that are parts of larger communities that share pools / health clubs, etc. Claremont has more typical small houses. There are some large canyons that go through Claremont. All of these areas are close to multiple freeways, making the rest of San Diego fairly easily accessible.

PEOPLE
These areas appear to have your standard family / middle class housing. This is definitely a more suburban crowd.

CULTURE / THINGS TO DO
Some residential complexes have their own pools and gym, and they may have events going on. In terms of restaurants / bars / shops, there tend to be more strip-malls and fewer dense streets. We'd no longer be able to leave the apartment and walk to a restaurant. However, since these areas are very centrally located, it wouldn't be difficult to drive downtown or to the beaches, where there are more entertainment options available.

WEATHER
It's still San Diego, so nothing to complain about here.

GETTING AROUND
Here, it's almost exclusively the car. Biking is possible, but the area is fairly hilly, so we'd certainly get in shape.

SPORTS
These areas are probably closest to the football stadium, although with all of the freeways near here, getting to Petco Park can't be too hard.

OVERALL
It would be an adjustment, but I think this area could work, especially if the new office were to be in the area. We'd need to find the right type of apartment, but it's possible.

That's all for now. We really enjoyed San Diego, but we also enjoyed the Bay Area, so Carrie and I have some thinking to do. We may need to do what we do best -- make a spreadsheet and start figuring things out. Once we get this California decision settled, I'll post more about the other fun California things like the Amtrak... and then we'll be in full scale South America prep-mode! I can't believe it's only a couple weeks away.

Bay Area Adventures!

After a quick stop in Groton, MA, it was on to California to determine where we should live when our travels are over. We took car to commuter rail, commuter rail to the T, the T to the silver line (an underground bus that Boston likes to pretend is a train), silver line to airplane, airplane to airport shuttle in SFO, shuttle to BART, and BART to my brother’s apartment!

Chris very nicely let us borrow his car, so our first day in San Francisco, we decided to explore the East Bay (Berkley, Oakland, etc). We looked up a couple apartment listings on Craigslist and entered them into Dan’s GPS navigator. However, we kept ending up in “not so nice” parts of town, so instead, Dan came up with the idea of looking for interesting neighborhoods online and then using Google Earth to locate which streets looked like main drags. After driving down the main drag, if it looked like someplace we’d consider living, we would park and take a closer look. If we still liked what we saw, we’d also check out the nearby residential area. We found that looking at the cars in the neighborhood was a good way to determine if it is in our price range. Check out Dan’s blog to see a very thorough analysis of what we thought of the bay area.

In addition, to researching the Bay Area, we managed to squeeze in some entertainment as well. On Thursday we visited my Grandpa in Lafayette. He is 94, but still lives in the same house my Mom grew up in and is doing very well. He has a magic peach tree that grows 2 varieties of plums (he actually grafted the plum branches onto the tree). Thursday evening Chris’ friends, Sam and Katie, showed us around Oakland and Berkley. The highlight of the evening was going to this amazing dive bar tucked away in the back of a strip mall in El Cerrito. In addition to surprisingly cheap drinks, they had old fashioned décor with velvet wall paper!

Friday we explored San Jose and the Peninsula (south of San Francisco). In addition to exploring neihborhoods (see Dan’s blog), we decided to check out three of our favorite investments; Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Spongecell (privately held). We knew we were at Apple headquarters when everyone we saw were nerds, wearing jeans, either listening to their iPods and/or playing with their iPhones. We drove around Infinite Loop (name of the street) and then went to their visitor center. We asked for a tour and they very nicely told us that if we don’t have an appointment, we must leave. We asked if they had a museum of old Apple products and they said they had closed it because they needed the space, but that they had a visitor store that we were welcome to check out. We skipped the store and headed for Google.

After walking past the beach volley ball court and a security guard on a Segway, we made our way to Google’s visitor center. We told them we were investors and that we would like a tour. They also very nicely told us that unless we had an appointment, we must leave immediately, but unlike Apple, they gave us free juice on our way out! Next we headed to Spongecell’s headquarters, where they not only gave us a full tour, but they also gave us free pizza and booze!

On Saturday my brother hosted a BBQ. His backyard has a nice big deck and we lucked out and had amazingly sunny day. Chris bought several pounds of sausage from Costco and we made super fresh screwdrivers from oranges we squeezed ourselves (the vodka was store bought). That evening we met up with Dan’s friend Scott and his wife Jen, and we went to another party. The apartment was on a hill overlooking the city and as the fog thinned out towards the end of the party, we had a perfect view of Alcatraz.

Sunday we were back to work investigating the Bay Area, this time touring San Francisco on foot with my brother. San Francisco is extremely hilly, which made for a perfect opportunity to test out my new hiking boots for the hike to Machu Picchu. They definitely need some more breaking in. Sunday evening we went to a jazz club in Oakland called Yoshi’s. We happened to catch the last night of the Pete Escovedo Orchestra. They’re from Oakland and had a lot of friends and family there that night, so they really let loose! In addition to his usual group Pete brought up 2 sons and a daughter and in addition to ragging on each other, they played some great Latin jazz.

Monday evening my brother’s company, Spongecell, took everyone to the Giants game. We all wore Spongecell T-shirts, and it was Irsh heritage day so we also got free hats! AT&T Park has an amazing view and our upper deck seats had a very nice view of the field. However, the $8 beers and lack of beer vendors were a little disappointing. It just so happened that Barry Bonds had recently tied for most career home runs, and he could potentially have broken the record at that game. Everyone has very excited! However, after several failed at bats, they took Barry out. Despite the tie score, at least half the fans left! I was very disappointed in the Giants fans. I was also disappointed to see Barry Bonds beat the home run record at the very next game! At least we got to see it on my parents fancy TV in Santa Barbara.

After nine innings the score was still tied, and all but 5 of the Spongecell group remained. Fortunately, the Giants managed to pull out a win after only a few additional innings! We went out to a bar to celebrate, and when we left, this random dude came up and asked if we wanted to
ride a tractor with him. I thought I had left behind all my tractor riding oppurtunites in the Midwest, so I was curious to find out what he meant. We followed him around the corner, and he told us he had noticed a construction site where they had left the keys in one of the machines! He got in, turned it on, and started moving the arm up and down. A night watchman came over and fairly quickly put his antics to an end. The next morning we woke up at 5:20 AM to take the train to Santa Barbara. I'll write more later, but for now I'm heading to the beach!