Ah, San Luis Obispo, the happiest place in the country, my old college town, and the last leg of our trip to CA. This place holds many memories. It’s where I first developed my enthusiasm for bicycling and where I grew to love the feel of a small, walkable town. It had been about 8 […]
My mom’s garden is immense. Em liked to come out here to sip her tea and bask in the sun in the morning before my mom woke up. There’s the most impressive rosemary bush I’ve ever seen. It’s constantly moving from the swarm of drunken bees rolling around in it. We estimated about 200 bees […]
My grandma doesn’t travel anymore at her impressive age of 96, so it had been a while since we saw her. We planned to meet up with her for lunch in her retirement community’s dining hall. We showed up right when we had planned to, and my mom barged into Grandma’s room. She was well-dressed […]
My mom recommended this place as well – the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway (I hesitate to include the link since their website makes it look more cheesy than it is, but so it goes). It’s an impressive feat of engineering – basically a cable-driven elevator that goes several thousand feet up a mountain to Mount […]
We saw a couple of things in Pasadena that remind me of my sister. Exhibit 1: a Hello Kitty store which was the pinkest store I have seen in recent memory. Exhibit 2: Fish Dish seafood restaurant. I once heard Kira recite the rhyme, “I wish for a fish on a dish.” Score one point […]
Em wanted to visit this place when we came put here last year, but we didn’t make it then due to some lousy weather at the time. This time, we made it, and Em was primed for it. This attraction is alternately referred to as “The Huntington Library” or “The Huntington Library and Gardens”, or […]
My mom recommended and brought us to this place – The Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. It was quite a good find. Em got in touch with her green thumb, and I found a bunch of native California flora that reminded me of days gone by. The prickly pear cacti reminded me of the cactus […]
We barely made it out of Rhode Island before another storm cancelled many flights out of the northeast. We had a series of cascading delays and failures, but we were at least able to escape – it just meant spending a lot of time in Washington Dulles airport. I discovered this service animal relief area, […]
I thought the US was the most capitalist country in the world, and all things considered, maybe it still is, but Japan surprised me a bit in how privatized some parts of daily life are. The train system in Japan consists of several private companies (and no public ones). The main company, the Japan Railways […]
My coworker, Alex mentioned that track racing was a thing in Japan, so I went to see a race. I had to travel an hour and a half to get to the track for the only race in the area during our stay – at the Kishiwada Keirin. For some unfathomable reason, no one else […]