California Trip - Day 3

Riding a Segway has long been on my bucket list. I have always thought the machine is an incredibly cool invention, even though it’s expensive and hasn’t really taken the world by storm as the company had hoped. My son has also wanted to ride one, ever since we saw them at Disney World when he was 11 years old. Sadly, you had to be 12 or older to ride at the time, so he was out of luck. Now he’s 16 so when I noticed an ad for Segway tours through Golden Gate Park, I jumped at the chance!

The tour from the Electric Tour Company consisted of a 45 minute training and practice session where everyone learned to ride the Segways. The remainder of the 2 1/2 hours was spent touring the park. Learning to ride the machine was an experience, a little scary but ultimately fairly intuitive. My son picked it up quickly as well and we both had a blast tooling around the paved, and sometimes unpaved trails. The Segway moves effortlessly up and down hills with a surprising amount of control! It will even “push back” on you when you approach the programmed speed limit, which in our case was 10 MPH. Riding one of these “personal transport devices” is a highly recommended experience to try, look around in your area for tours or rentals.

After the tour and an impromptu lunch of hot dogs, we drove to the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped at the visitor center. Actually, the place was packed so we had to park down the road a bit and walk back to the start of the bridge. This is a very popular tourist attraction and there were many people walking and riding bikes over the bridge. We decided to walk to the mid point, taking pictures along the way. The bridge is an incredible feat of human design and ingenuity which has to be experienced by foot rather than a quick drive over. The weather was sunny and nice but obviously windy on the bridge and very noisy due to the traffic. The scenes of San Francisco Bay are fantastic from the middle, or any point along the 1.7 mile long bridge.

Next stop was Fisherman’s Wharf. This place must be busy year round. We walked all around taking in the sights, sounds and aromas of the various restaurants and shops. One interesting place we stumbled upon was Musée Mécanique. This is a museum filled with a private collection of antique coin operated games and musical machines. It was fascinating to see all the different types of machines from the turn of the twentieth century through the late 1990s, most of them still working!

By this time we were both thinking about dinner. We went back out and walked down Jefferson Street looking for an interesting place to eat. We finally decided on Cioppino's which had a lot of delicious sounding Italian dishes on their menu. I was very surprised to find New England Style clam chowder (chowdah) on the list! Being 3000 miles away from New England I was skeptical, but it was very good. After dinner we skipped dessert to walk down to Ghirardelli Square to get some renowned Ghirardelli chocolate. We bought a variety of their famous chocolate squares in a tin box to bring back home. They rewarded us with a free caramel square sampler! Perfect. That wrapped up the day and we headed back to the hotel to crash.

California Trip - Day 2

Our plan for day 2 was to drive north to Petaluma to visit the TWiT Brick House, the studio where the TWiT family of “netcasts” are produced. We planned to visit during the broadcast of MacBreak Weekly, the podcast all about Apple related news and events. We arrived a little early at 10:30 and we waited in the lobby where the walls are covered with engraved tiles from the many backers of the studio, very impressive.

About 11:00 we were allowed into the studio and were seated in comfortable chairs in front of the host Leo Laporte’s desk which was in reality a large oak dining room table. The lighting and equipment was very impressive as this podcast is also broadcast in HD video format. The show was very interesting, and had two regular panelists; Andy Ihnatko, ironically from the Boston area, and Rene Ritchie from iMore.com.

After the show, we were invited to sit next to Leo at the table and chat for pictures. An assistant took my phone and began snapping photos of us while we were talking with Leo. This was an unexpected benefit and a real nice touch on Leo’s part. We also were able to walk around the three sets that are in the studio and see how things are arranged which was very cool.

After the visit to the studio we walked around the area to find a good place for lunch, we settled for a nice restaurant named Dempsey’s with outdoor seating. Good food and eating outside is always a treat, even though there were a few pesky bees flying around.

On the way back we stopped at Muir Woods and hiked through the park. The old redwood trees here are amazing! This is a popular spot for seeing an unusual forest with lots of trails of varying degrees of difficulty. We chose the main loop but also took a little side path that started up fairly steep terrain. We continued for a while, hoping to reach some kind of summit but around every turn was additional steep grades! Finally we decided to turn around and return to the main path which took us back to the trail head. Gorgeous scenery was all around and we could see that we were quite high up. It reminded us of the famous speeder bike chase from Star Wars Return of the Jedi, but that was filmed in Cheatham Grove near Eureka California.

On the way back to Milpitas, we also stopped at the Muir Beach Overlook, which featured spectacular views of the rocky California coastline. Muir Beach itself was closed until November for construction but this made up for it. Very windy and even a bit chilly since we were wearing shorts and tee shirts.

Finally back in the car to head to the hotel. By now it was rush hour and parts of route 101 south were slowing down considerably. We decided to stop at an In-N-Out burger place to sample the iconic west coast fast food. We were surprised by the simplistic menu, but that made ordering easy! Food was good, much better than Five Guys in our opinion. After dinner the traffic had eased up and we made our way back to the hotel to crash, and play some Monopoly on our phones. Another day awaited us after a good night's sleep.