Florence

With few plans in place, all my evenings when Florence was here were spent planning (and mapping) what we were gonna do the next day. Sitting here in the Chicago airport waiting for my delayed flight, I finally have time to blog, though I don't have Flo's pics yet.

Here's the rapid-fire bullet point version of the past week:

Wed., Aug. 2nd - The arrival

• Florence arrives


• Winning my volleyball game to come out on top of the losers bracket


• Posing as a U of M Masters' student doing an internship in the Bay Area, I get her into the Google Engineering Intern Open House. Having noticed that Janna indicated in her calendar that she was going, I invited myself as her guest :)


• The food was crap, the talks were ok, the free shirt is really what counted, and being able to sneak around security so I could show Florence around was great

Thurs., Aug. 3rd - San Francisco

• Big tourist day, though I had two things to do this day (lunch with Nevan at UCSF and Kelly Clarkson's concert), which we worked around, i.e. Florence shopping while I did other things


• Twin Peaks on a clear day, Golden Gate Bridge without fog, and walked all along the pier


• The Vegas plan falls through with Mike not feeling great, Adam's idiotic move of trying to stand on an oversized exercise ball and getting a concussion, and everyone else being wusses

Fri., Aug. 4th - Museums

• Asian Art Museum


• Chinatown


• Legion of Honor (for the Monet in Normany exhibit)


• Japantown


• Getting kicked out of Kan Zaman on Haight St. for not ordering a minimum amount of food at 10 pm when we just wanted dessert


• Gelati in North Beach


• Twin Peaks at night in the fog

Sat., Aug. 5th - Winchester

• Slow afternoon let me plan out the Napa trip


• Winchester Mystery House (a horribly built mansion where they charge an inordinate amount of money for you to see)


• FREE FOOD AT PANERA. Oh how I miss free food :p. Thanks Sean!


• Poker at Panera where Brian and me had a side bet to see who would drive to Napa. We both lost in the same hand to Mike. Brian kindly volunteered to drive, which ended up being a good idea b/c of his car's navigational system and my lack of a printer (and resulting poorly hand drawn maps)

Sun., Aug. 6th - Napa

• 30 wines!


• The key to the day was the schedule that I told people, and the contingency plan I had in place, knowing that we wouldn't make the original schedule


• Rubicon Estate (Francis Ford Coppola's winery), Beringer (crap), Beaulieu (meh), random small winery behind BV (suprisingly good), and Domaine Chandon.
  
• Some of the wineries we went to were way too commercial


• Nice find for lunch at some sandwich shop in St. Helena


• Mitsuwa for dinner, meeting up with Janna, Sean, Adam, Michele, and Jenny in addition to our group of me, Florence, Brian, Mike, and Natalia.


• Coldstone

Mon., Aug. 7th - Yosemite

• 400 miles of driving, 5 hours of hiking/walking


• In-N-Out for dinner

Tues., Aug. 8th - Tech company tour

• Nasa Ames, Microsoft, Google (for lunch at Cafe 7), Yahoo, Juniper Networks, AMD, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, Apple


• Victorious in Google's volleyball tournament finals part 1


• Snuck into the Google Dance ;). Not even "The Enforcer" could stop me!

Wed., Aug. 9th - The departure

• Xerox PARC, Stanford Linear Accelerator, Stanford, Jamba Juice, Cheesecake Factory, SFO

Thanks for visiting Florence, it was a blast!

Flight is soon (hopefully) and my battery is running out...