We Made it to San Francisco!!!!!

When we arrived in SF from our massive trip we were ready for a break, ready to hang with old friends and make new ones, we knew we had lots of work ahead of us getting our living situation in order and finding jobs. A few months later...it's all gone by pretty quickly and we're thrilled that we made the move!

At first we stayed in the Inner Richmond on friend's couches for two weeks, then got a sublet nearby for six weeks (from a dude who has since become one of my best SF buds!). After about two months we got a more permanent place in the Outer Richmond. We've been loving it out here since. We've made loads of new friends and have traveled all over the Bay Area - gorgeous country. It's much different out here from Manhattan!

I've taken about 10,000 photos in the Bay Area already and I'd love to share them all, but let's face it, we all have short attention spans. That's the case throughout this entire blog - I take thousands of shots and post maybe 1 in 100 (seriously, it's probably more like 1 in 1,000), it takes lots of time to do this so "cheers" to you for reading. I hope that you'll go ahead and check out our trip from start to finish - it was such an AWESOME ride!

Also, I gotta say, I'm really glad I created this site to preserve some of the memories of the trip and I would urge others to take the time to do the same for whatever event or trip they'd like to remember and share.

Cheers again, ciao people! *cue the outro music*

Ocean Beach and Sutro Park:









Golden Gate Park:


Cliff House area:




Sea Lions!


Crissy Fields & Golden Gate Bridge:


The downtown from Dolores Park:


Mission Dolores & a typical SF Victorian home:


Xmas tree burning on Ocean Beach:


Wine tasting in Napa, Sonoma, and Lodi:








Then Obama won the election and everything seemed to be coming together nicely in the world!


And finally, I started brewing beer. Here's a pic of my first brew, a straight ahead amber. Cheers to you for reading, come have a brew with me sometime!

Driving through the Willamette Valley and breaking down in Grant's Pass, Oregon

Yeah, so the Willamette Valley is gorgeous to tool through, but try REALLY hard not to break down in Grant's Pass...there's not much to do there. Trust me.

Easy St is off to the right...



There are several Weeds in OR, this here is the way to "Central Weed."



Right about at Grant's Pass, the car started doing some funny stuff, like puttering the way a car does when it's running out of gas. I didn't want to push it and end up damaging it worse, so we pulled into a Holiday Inn parking lot and called up AAA and got our SECOND tow of the trip (the first being in Durango, if you'll recall, Dear Reader).





Grant's Pass -- "It's the Climate!"

Visiting Carson's Grandparents in Eugene, Oregon

We popped into Eugene, OR to visit with Carson's grandparents. It was a nice relaxing time and a great visit.

Shell & Jan, plus Jake the puppy!



Lookin' good, Jake, FETCH!



Eugene has Geese.



The sun shines on Eugene. Oh, and it has a river.



It was great meeting the fam for me and seeing them again for Carson. They're not TOO far away, so we hope to see them again soon!

Images of Portland, Oregon

Portland was another city that was on our short-list of places we were thinking about moving to. Honestly, I loved it and if I knew a few people that lived there already I may well have voted to stay. It was gorgeous, had great public transportation, incredible nature surroundings, and the the best book stores ever (other than maybe Strand in NYC, of course). Everyone there was friendly and warm, the city is well planned out, and the restaurant/foodie/craft beer brewing scene there is fantastic, plus they've got wine flowing in from the Willamette Valley right next door.

We stayed at Ace Hotel, great. Ate at Le Pigeon and the McMenamin's Kennedy School, fantastic. Chilled at the Jupiter Hotel bar, fun. Drank at Portland City Grill on the top floor of the tallest building in town (and at a bunch of other places), excellent. Spent a bunch of time browsing in Powell's Book Store, which is awesome. I liked it, I liked it a lot.



It's not a huge city, and certainly not very tall. Like I mentioned above, we did hang out at Portland City Grill, a piano bar at the top of the tallest buildings in town, which was great.





2,443 miles from Times Square, sigh.



Mt. Hood looms on the horizon.



Powell's Book Store. Note the Elvis impersonator singing out front.



Turkey Vulture at the Audubon Sanctuary, where we hiked some trails and met various ravens, vultures, and other birds.



A couple random shots...





Bye Portland, we loved you!

Images of Seattle, Washington

Seattle was on our short-list of cities we were considering moving to. While it didn't end up that we wanted to stay, we did think Seattle rocked.

Oh, and let me just say that, yes I know there are things in Seattle other than the Space Needle. It's just that I like a bunch of my pics of it, sorry!

I'll just get all the Space Needle pics out of the way first...



An obvious shot that I saw in the NYT recently --





At some point we ended up right by it...because I just HAD to go to the Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame! It was awesome and you should go there, too, by the way.





Ok. Moving on...

If you thought cops on Segways was interesting, wait 'till you see these bad boys.



Seattle has AWESOME parks!



We really loved the Pike Place Market, it'd almost be worth living in Seattle just for that.









One thing Seattle has is insane traffic. And also Mt. Ranier!



Like the sign says, head this way to Portland, OR, that's our next stop!