Last weekend I spent a few days in Santa Cruz with some friends. It was fun, but I was expecting it to be just Saturday and we ended up sleeping over in a motel which meant spending the whole weekend in the same clothes.

I also didn’t bet on the weather being warm, so I neglected to take decent sunscreen, flip flops and shorts. I managed to borrow most of what I needed, but smelled quite a lot.

Us at Santa Cruz

Spot the two Irish guys (clue: look for the sun tan)

The guy on the left on this photo is the craziest driver I’ve ever sat with. On the highway he crossed 3 or 4 lanes in a row without hesitation and kept doing it every few minutes. We visited a state park and he played chicken with a driver coming the opposite direction.

On Tuesday, we had a going away party of me at Jillian’s, a pool bar downtown. We had fun, and there was free food so that made the whole experience better. I’m a little sad now that a little over one month I will be home.

Sad, yes, but I have one heck of a trip planned before that and a lot of sightseeing to do. Without doubt I will be back in the US and I would love to see all 50 states in my lifetime.

This weekend I’m rather stuck. I’m going to the San Mateo County Fair later, mainly to see Weird Al Yankovich, but also because it sounds like fun and one of those typical American ‘win a stuffed toy for you girlfriend’ type of places. Tomorrow, I have the option of either going to the Renaissance Fair in the GG Park, with jousting and all that kinda stuff (free of course), or else spending the day at a Wordpress Conference learning some stuff that could come in useful ($20). Haven’t decided which yet.

Our Yosemite trip last weekend was awesome, we went hiking and went up to Glacier Point, which has one of the most amazing views in the world. I said I would blog about it, but I can’t really be bothered now to be honest. If it’s not fresh in my mind, then there’s no point. Here’s a cute picture though.

And one from Glacier Point:

Sometimes I wish I had an SLR to get better photos.

Anyway, what have I been up to since then. Well, this past weekend I was off work on Friday and Saturday. It was unusually warm both days, Friday it was so bad that I had to leave my room. I was working on some web design projects and got very little done due to the heat. I had windows open, doors open…just too warm to stay inside, so I went swimming in Fisherman’s Wharf. Unfortunately it was even warmer outside, so I stayed in the shade most of the day. I met up with Valerie after work and we went to North Beach for some authentic Italian pesto pizza and gelato. Pesto is a herb, by the way. Valerie thinks it’s a type of meat.

Saturday was just as warm. Myself and the girlfriend went up to the wharf again for a bit of swimming and lazing around. We had planned on visiting the Exploratorium but figured it was too nice a day to stay inside. I slapped on the suncream but I still managed to get myself burned. It was 36°C, waaaay too warm.

On the way back, we stopped by the French Music Festival. It wasn’t exactly crowded, proving that the Irish are more popular in SF (cf. St Patrick’s Day parade). We stayed to see Tete, or Monsieur Tete as I like to call him. He wore a hat, and was decent, but nothing special.

Finally we stopped in the Hilton to use their hot tub and pool before going back home. I found it difficult to get to sleep because of the temperature, so I left the window open and slept on top of the bed. Stupid weather, it was about 15°C in the morning, and I woke up with the sniffles. It’s crap to have sunburn while sick not acclimatised to the new weather. Spent most of last night in bed

I apologise that it’s been two weeks since my last post, I partly blame Wordpress for changing their format which caused me to lose some saved drafts which I couldn’t be bothered typing again until now. Another mention must go to my university, as I’ve spent the last 2 weeks doing my placement report which has taken up a lot of time.

So it’s 6.30am and I’m working from home answering the calls. Usually I do it from my bed but today I can’t sleep so I thought I’d make productive use of my time and write something.

Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend, which traditionally is a big weekend for travelling for Americans. Due to the rising gas prices, more Americans are staying closer to home now though. I tried to organise a trip to Yosemite for myself and some friends, but failed due to finding no accommodation at the park and had to cancel the trip, causing everyone to back out of going anywhere.

So it ended up being just Valerie and me, as usual. And we had a great weekend.

We rented a car on Friday night (upgraded from the cheap compact we reserved to a big Jeep for free!), and we drove from SF down the coast to Monterey. We spent the night at the youth hostel there and paid a visit to the world famous aquarium there the next morning. Took a video camera with us too, so maybe I’ll get a video made someday.

In the afternoon we drove down Highway 1, to Big Sur and made a short stop to do a bit of hiking to McWay Cove, in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. It’s beautiful:

After the walk, we drove all the way down to Santa Barbara, which isn’t far from LA. It’s a beach town, and we spent the night there and all of the next day. It was nice, but because the weather wasn’t great there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Apparently the best part of Santa Barbara is the university (aptly named UCSB), but of course we didn’t know to go there. One of the tour guides with my company is actually leaving to go study in UC Santa Barbara this summer.

One of the cool little places we stopped at along the way to SB was Solvang. It’s a little Danish village a bit bigger than Broughshane that doesn’t have much to offer in the way of activities but is nice to just take a walk through and maybe visit a bakery.

After seeing all that Santa Barbara had to offer on the Sunday, I thought it would be wise to start to make our way back towards San Francisco as it would cut down on our driving the next day and finding a motel would be cheaper elsewhere than Santa Barbara. So we headed to a little seaside village called Morro Bay, where I had booked a motel for cheap that I saw an advert for in a hotels catalogue. Turns out the place was a complete scam, and…well I’ll let my review of the dump on Tripadvisor tell the story…

Luckily, the last day of the trip turned out to be probably the best. The main activity was a visit to Hearst Castle, which isn’t really a castle I suppose but is an extremely impressive mansion built atop a hill in San Simeon by the famous media magnet William Randolph Hearst. If you’ve seen the movie Citizen Kane then you may be familiar with him (I actually own it on DVD, but thought it was a bit pants…but maybe I just never took the time to appreciate it…). This mansion is absolutely stunning. You can’t wander around it yourself, you must take a tour so Valerie and I took the 90 minute ‘Experience’ tour which takes you around a good part of the estate. It really has to be seen to be believed. I enjoyed every minute of the tour, and after taking it there is a free IMAX movie which details the story behind the mansion. It’s really inspiring stuff - Hearst’s father moved to the Bay Area like so many, looking for gold. He took a big risk by transporting tons on what was thought to be lead to San Francisco over the Sierra Nevada mountains, a move that near bankrupted him. Paid off in the end though - it turned out to be tons of pure silver and made him a great fortune. A lot of this was passed onto William Randolph Hearst, but he built up a huge newspaper empire in his own right. When he died, his family passed it on to the state to be turned into a State Monument as they wanted to see it preserved. It’s worth close to a billion I’m sure, as it’s crammed with priceless artwork.

Check out some photos:
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After leaving Hearst Castle we stopped briefly in Carmel to play frisbee on the beach, then visited that American institution - Walmart.

It’s sooo cheap at Walmart. It was the first time I visited one, since they don’t have any in San Francisco and the nearest one is in San Leandro which is at least an hour from SF. I got a SF Giants cap, sunglasses and a bunch of food for about $18. And they stock everything from clothes, TV’s and surfboards!

Got back to San Francisco about 8.30pm which was great as I’d expected huge traffic but there wasn’t really any traffic jams at all. Great little weekend!

Charlton Heston

So, famous Hollywood star Charlton Heston died a little over a week ago. Of course it got a mention in all the newspapers, but this one from the Onion had me in fits of laughter. You can tell they’ve been sitting on that headline for years.

Joe Satriani

I also took this short video of Joe Satriani from Guitar Center a few weeks ago. The quality is poor, but you can’t expect much from a tiny camera. This video is the last bit of Satch Boogie. Listen at around 1:00 minute into the video he does one of his trademark squealing divebombs!

Great America

Getting onto the real subject of the post, at the weekend I went to Great America, a theme park close to Santa Clara. It’s not very far from San Francisco - about 30 miles or so - but we had to take public transit as we don’t have a car. That involves taking the Caltrain to Mountain View (where Google is), and then the VTA to the park. In total it’s a little under two hours travel.

At Mountain View, there was a little fresh food market right beside the station, so while we waited on the VTA to come, we indulged in some awesome strawberries. This would prove to be a mistake to a certain person later on in the day…

At Great America, I was expecting long queues for each ride, as last time I went each ride was approx. 30-45 minutes wait. Looks like we picked a good day as the lines were super short; I think the longest we waited was about 10 minutes and most of the big coasters had essentially no queue at all.

The weather was really sweltering, I’m sure it was close to 100ºF. I slapped on the suncream though and managed to survive the day with minimal burning. I really think I’m adjusting to the warmer climate.

There’s a big Nickelodeon theme at the park, so I got my photo with Spongebob Squarepants. I also have a rather attractive Patrick hat photo.

Valerie screamed with genuine terror on most of the rollercoasters, but in the end admitted that she enjoyed them. However, the Survivor ride was a little more than she could handle and she made a quick exit to deposit the aforementioned strawberries. It wasn’t the greatest ride, to be fair. It basically just spins you around and around. Maybe it’s called Survivor to see if you can avoid spewing at the end. Who knows.

I think we pretty much visited every ride in the park, except the water maze in the kids area. I was absolutely roasting and really wanted to run through all the water fountains, but they have a stupid rule that adults can only go on it if accompanied by a little one. They must suspect that everyone over 4 feet tall is a pervert.

I’ll upload all the photos to Flickr later. Check them out if you so choose.

I got up yesterday and went to work, and it was really warm for a change. In fact it was near 9 o’clock when I was walking home and I was warm just wearing a t-shirt. Then today I get up for work and it’s actually warmer! Absolutely no hesitation - it was shorts and t-shirt today.

Right now Google says it’s 31?C (87?F) in San Francisco. That’s crazy, it’s usually quite mild here! I went for lunch and opened the door to a pleasant draught of warm air. It’s just a shame I’m at work and not out enjoying my day at the beach or somewhere. Valerie and friend Gaelle are out on a drive to the North Bay today, visiting some stuff north of wine country. They were going to go to Santa Cruz but there isn’t much to do there, other than the beach. If I was off today, I’d join the girls and go to Santa Cruz and spend the day surfing.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. This little spell of unseasonably warm weather is fading fast and by Monday it’s going to drop back down to about 14?C (58?F). Tomorrow, I do however have a day off and I plan to go to Great America, a theme park near San Jose. I’ve been before, and it’s a lot of fun so I hope it’s not too crowded because of the weather.

I was also thinking about Hawai’i again this week. I’ve been thinking about going back and spending my month before I come home there, but in the last week or so, two of the major low-cost airlines out to the islands have filed for bankruptcy and have ceased operations. Aloha (the ones I went with before) and ATA Airlines have both cited rising fuel costs as the reason for bankruptcy, with ATA also losing a huge contract with FedEx which ultimately caused them to go under.

To that end, a flight out to Hawai’i is not going to come cheap anymore. At the moment, minus taxes etc., booking a flight to Honolulu round trip for August is around $550, with quite a few of those flight going via LA making the trip over 15 hours. I paid less than that booking last minute (ok it was off-season to be fair), but I’m so glad I went when I did and also glad that I didn’t book early with Aloha for this summer. What are all their passengers going to do now?

Anyway, I’m off for a coke now and going to relax with the 10 minutes I have remaining of my lunch break.

Can’t believe it’s April already. It’s really making me realise how little time I have left here in America, and how much I really, really don’t want to go home. As charming as Ireland is, I’d rather leave San Francisco when I decide rather than being forced to leave to go back to university.

In saying that, it’s only April and the rush of tourists booking holidays here has started already. I don’t talk about my job alot, mostly because it’s not very exciting and because I have much more interesting things to talk about besides work (although I reckon my job is probably quite interesting to some people).

The problem with working for a tour company is that it’s a world of opposites. Like when most people get a day off, the tourism industry is at it’s busiest, which means that I can’t look forward to public holidays. For example, my friends get Christmas off because it’s a national holiday so they want have a party or go somewhere - but for our company it’s like a normal day, except our vehicles are full of non-Christian tourists who don’t celebrate the same traditions, and are looking to get away for the day. That boils down to us having to work pretty much every day of the year.

Summer in the city is beautiful. The weather is great and there’s so much to do, but I find myself with things needing done at the office and I end up doing a juggling act between finishing my projects and answering 3 calls at once about tours. I end up staying way later than I’d planned and get home so worn out and feeling that the days are just passing me by. It’s so frustrating when people ask dumb questions and waste your time, or book a stay at the Yosemite Lodge 2 days before without realising it’s sold out practically a year in advance. All this and then the hassles of a regular IT job trying to figure out how javascript works, and just when you think you’ve cracked it - Internet Explorer goes and ruins your day. Sometimes I just wish that Internet Explorer was a myth, and the world used Firefox.

Another reason my industry sucks is that our Yosemite tours start at the unwholesome hour of 6am, and someone has to be there to reassure Mr and Mrs Punctuality that the tour bus is on it’s way. On the opposite end of the scale, it’s lots of fun to impulsively decide to go drink wine all day in Napa and book it late at night last minute - at 10pm the night before. Again, someone (read: me!) has to be there to make that happen for them. I’m actually jealous of regular 9-5ers who at least can leave and have a life after a day at work.

It’s also a nice touch that I get maybe one weekend off every 3 months. That hurts a lot, especially when all your friends are away enjoying themselves at the beach or whatever. Plus, more than half my monthly wages goes on rent. More than half.

I really shouldn’t complain though. I set myself up for it, so I take full responsibility. I just warn others what they may be getting into working for a tour company. And if you are considering going on a tour somewhere, please be kind and think of us poor people that have to deal with your crap. Sorry for the rant.