Shutdown 2006 - Day 2 to 4 - The City of Angels

Crusin down highway 1 through Malibu. This is the beach in the show Baywatch. We were on our way from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. There were lots of surfers out on the water along this stretch and we were able to see some dolphins jumpin in the water too. The Highway 1 goes right through the 27 mile stretch of Malibu beach front. The houses in the hills are homes to many entertainment stars. Below is one of the beaches we stopped at.
Just beyond Malibu we enter into Los Angeles County. First stop was the Famous Santa Monica Pier. This place is pretty cool. You can see below all the stuff they got on the pier. Restaurants, Arcades, Museums, and Rides. It's crazy. This is also a good spot to get tickets for the different shows in Hollywood that you can sit in on. We got tickets for The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. LOL, and Snoop Dogg was on it. Jokes..
Below is another cool picture of Santa Monica State Beach. After Santa Monica we went in-land to Hollywood. We did the usual Kodak Theatre, Hollywood Sign and Chinese Grauman Theatre.
After we saw the taping of the Late Late show down at the CBS studios we headed over to Venice Beach. This is really cool, and I didn't know about this until I visted Venice beach this time that they actualy have canals! One of the builders/owners back in 1905 built a bunch of canals to drain out the marchy lands that used to exist there. Afterwards they built a lot of structurs with an Italian style and kept the canals. They called it the Venice of America. Below you can see one of the canals.
Once you get out onto the actual Venice Beach, also known as Muscle beach cause there are a lot of people on the beach lifting weights, it's really really nice. They have all kinds of activites on the beach you can do, basketball courts, skateboard parks, and even walls and structures meant to grafitti on.
Off in the distance we could see a huge mass of people on the beach and we couldn't see what they were doing. So we decided to head over to check it out. To our suprise we found a huge drum party. Everyone came to the beach and brought a drum instrument with them. And they just kept the beat going and going and going... It was really amazing.
Afterwards, we spent the night out on the town. Hollywood has some pretty good clubs and bars on Sunset and Hollywood Blvd.

The next day we headed south of the city and got a hotel in Orange County. Orange county is the county right below Los Angeles County. The most famous city there is Newport Beach where they film the OC. Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach are also in the OC. We hit the beach and played some Vollyball. So much fun.
Below is the famous Newport Pier.
Here is the group of us catching the beautiful west coast sun set. It was amazing !
Before leaving LA we stopped by Beverly Hills. This is where all the movie stars live. It's a really beutiful area. Below is Beverly Hills Highschool. It was really nice. What I found interesting is the backdrop of coporate america. After this we drove down the street to Rodeo Drive.
Lastly, We grabbed a beer from the Manhattan Beach Brewing Company. The beer here was pretty good.

LA is made up of many boroughs much like New York City is made up of Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn..... Along the coast some big ones are Santa Monica, Venice, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Rodondo beach. Inland you have Burbank, Hollywood, Pasadena, Inglewood, Compton, Torrance, and the list goes on... This city is really huge. You can see why this is a really good example of urban sprawal.

Shutdown 2006 - Day 1 - Santa Barbara

The company I work for shuts down for a week in the summer for everyone to have a vacation and usually this is the perfect opportunity to do some travelling. We have spent an entire month with the new interns that have come to replace us while we go back to school and we hvae been rallying them to come on the big Shut Down Trip. Since today was also my last day of work, I do not have to come back to work after the trip. So, we have decided to extend the trip and use it to travel accross America while the rest of the new interns head back to the bay area. The plan is to make it to Dallas and fly back to Toronto from Dallas. My buddy Chris and I will take 17 days for the trip which is amazing!!!!

Itinerary:
Day 1 - Drive from San Francisco to Santa Barbara
Day 2-4 - Spend 3 days in LA
Day 5-7 - Spend 3 days in San Diego
Day 8-12 - Spend 5 days in Las Vegas
Day 13 - Spend the day in Grand Canyon and Phoenix
Day 14 - The whole day is spent traveling from Phoenix to San Antonio
Day 15 - Spend the day in Corpus Christi, Texas
Day 16 - Spend the day in Austin, Texas
Day 17 - Spend the day in Dallas, Texas and fly home

Day 1 - Highway #1 and Santa Barbara

My buddy Chris arrived the night before in San Francisco and we had a chance to check out a small number of the sites around the city like the Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street. We slept in a bare apartment that night because I was completely moved out!!! After the trip I was moving back to Toronto. We woke up early that morning to meet up with the rest of the new and old interns that were going on the trip. We had 5 cars total heading south for the trip and we were all excited. Chris, Alex S, Alex N and myself hopped into the "ferrari" and headed south to Monterey where we picked up Highway #1. The clouds were rolling over the coastal hills and it looked pretty cool:
We headed south from Monterey along the coast. This takes us through Big Sur State Park and it's beautiful. This is probably the most scenic portion of the Highway #1 drive. Although most of the drive is very very scenic and I would recommend driving along it at any spot you can. I took this picture at a random location along the highway cause I thought it was nice.
As we were driving along the highway, I don't know how Chris saw this but in the distance through the trees he saw a waterfall. So we stopped the car and hiked through the forest. And sure enough he was right and we found this huge waterfall and pool. This is the first "Ill Nana" of the trip. So we decided to do some swiming and check out behind the waterfall. Check out the cool pics:

We ended up climbing to the top of the waterfall to get an excellent photo and view of the pool below. You always need to do a little exploring to find the real gems of each place you travel to because a lot of the time, they are off the beaten path. We packed up and kept heading south and then we happen to see some strange things on the beach and we didn't know exactly what it was. So we stopped and got out and the beach was covered with Elephant Seals. I had never seen so many in one spot just laying and soaking in the sun. This was "Ill Nana" number two! We were off to a good start of the trip.
After following the coast we made it to Santa Barbara for the sun set. This is by far my favorite city in California. It is nestled on the coast between the beach and the green hills. It faces south-east so the sun sets behind the city instead of on the water. Here is a great pic of Chris and I when we arrived.
Another great thing about Santa Barbara is that it has a very vibrant night life. We were very excited and we quickly cleaned up for a night on the town. This day was definitely a great start to a great trip! Ill NANA!

Monterey

Sonia, Marcus and I took a day trip down to Monterey. Montery is about 1.5 hours south from the bay area and about 45 min south of Santa Cruz. The weather was beautiful and we got out and roamed around the city. There are a few main attractions such as Cannery Row. Cannery Row started when Chinese Fisherman settled in the area. The fishing industry turned into a canning industry in the early 1900s. And during WWI the demand for canned food exploded. The main canned goods were Sardines.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck told of the exploits of a band of bums on Cannery Row, surrounded by bordellos, flophouses, a Chinese grocery store and the laboratory of a man who, in reality, was quietly revolutionizing modern marine biology: Ed Ricketts - the "Doc" of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.Another intersting fact is that Monterey used to be the capital of California from 1777 to 1849 under the Mexico and Spain flag. Only on July 7th, 1846 did the American Navy seize Monterwy and raise the American flag.
I found this great picture of Monterey and I thought I would share it.

San Luis Obispo

San Luis Obispo is a cool place on the west coast 3 hours south of San Fran and about an hour north of Santa Barbara. We ended up going here last summer 2005. It is also the home of CalPoly Technic which is a fairly famous technology school. Andrew had a friend of the family living here renting houses to the students and we were lucky enough that no one was renting their house at the moment and we stayed there for a night. It worked out very well. A very popular thing to do in SLO is to go out on the sand dunes with dune buggies or ATV's. We chose ATVs. These are Honda 250ex's which is a midclass size that you can rent. We took them out on the sand dunes for about 2 hours.
These things are pretty cool. Check us all out in a line. We were whipping around the san dunes all day. They are really bumpy and later we would suffer much soreness in our lower back afterwards.
Check out Marcus flying off a little sand dune and getting some air. We ended finding a few different small jumps that we got air off of and I have never seen a crazy fall like Andrew did. I can't believe he got up. Good thing no on got seriously hurt. And I am particularily happy that I did not get hurt because I did not have any HEALTH INSURANCE! It was fairly risky not to have it.
Jonathan is part of a fraternity back in Toronto and we spent the night hanging out at their frat house. It was good to get to know some locals and they told us where we could find the nude beach called Pirates Cove. You can see it below in the picture. Don't go their unless you want to see old men that look like leather. I warn you..
The coast line is very beautiful on this stretch between Santa Barbara and Monterey. I really like it. The beach here was very long and wide. We spent the afternoon soaking up the sun.
Up north about 43 miles there is a place called Hearst Castle. This is the home of the legendary William Rudolph Hearst who was a newspaper mogul. I suggest you read up on this guy, he is pretty interesting. The movie Citizen Kane written by Orsen Welles is loosely based on Hearst's life story.

Thanks Marcus for the pics and the info form your blog.

Highway #1

When Michelle came down in October 2005, one of the places we went to was Monterey and 17 Mile Drive. I already posted some pics from the first time I went there with Marcus so I won't talk about that. However, when Michelle and I were heading back to San Francisco I drove a stretch of highway #1 that I haven't driven before. That is from Santa Cruz to San Francisco (Highway #1 goes over the Golden Gate Bridge). The coastline is utterly amazing and as we Drove north along highway 1 I snapped some great shots. The first one below is from the Highway 1 itself, the others I took while we stopped along the way. Please scrool through them and check them out.




I did want to put this picture up from 17 Mile Drive. As you drive through it, the road is pretty windy and all the houses are up in here. It's pretty cool.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day, the time to remember the men and women who died in military service for their country. We used this 3 day weekend to party in the Arizona Desert and celebrate the beginning of summer.
The Hoover Damn is only one of 50 or so damns along the Colorado River. Behind the Hoover Damn is now Lake mead which is a huge reservoir that literally transforms the desert into a wet oasis. If you follow the Colorado down furthur into Arizona you come across a similar Oasis called Lake Havasu. You can see in the picture below the Arizona desert horison with the blueish green Colorado River running through it.
Every Memorial Day, thousands flock from the surrounding states packing beer, bathing suits and boats and turn this desert oasis into one of the biggest parties of the year. And we can assure you, that we did not miss this opportunity.
8 of us grabbed two rental cars and all our camping gear and heading 8 hours through the night to Lake Havasu on the Arizona California Border.
I could not believe the number of people there. We set up our camp on an island in the middle of the Colorado River. And we got our party on.
Here is Potapov with some lovely pasty white ladies. LOL>
One interesting thing is the London Bridge we used to cross the River onto our camp site. The story is that back in 1960's, England discovered that the "London Bridge Is Falling Down". So they put the bridge up for Auction. Lake Havasu ended up winning the bid and they started the process of taking it apart and shipping the bridge across the world to Lake Havasu where it was reconstructed. Below you can see the bridge.
On our way back, we drove through Las Vegas. Gotta love this place. We hit the Bellagio for some Memorial Day Buffet!!! mm good.

San Francisco

Michelle came down from Toronto late April and early May. We travelled all over the state, and of course went to San Fran. San Francisco is one of the nicest and unique cities on the west coast. I always check out the Golden Gate whenever I can. Here is Michelle hanging out on the north side of San Francisco Bay. The Bridge connects San Fran on the south to Sausalito to the north.The Golden Gate Bridge was the largest suspencion bridge ever constructed when it was completed in 1937 and it is an internationally recognized symbol of San Fran. Coming here also reminds me of Prof. Collins in our Civil Engineering class in First Year. We studied this bridge in depth and we learned how Joseph Strauss Designed and accompolished this great feat. And Prof. Collins was right, there is a life size statue of Strauss on the south side of the bridge and Strauss was a very short man.

Sequoia

Welcome to Sequoia National Park. It is located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains east of Fresno, California. It was the third national park to be established in the USA in 1890 (the first is Yellowstone, the second is Mackinac National Park). We orginally planned to camp out here at the park but I am really glad that we did not because of the threat of falling trees and of course the 2 feet of snow on the ground !.
This park is well known for the massive trees called Giant Sequoia's (Sequoiadendron giganteum). These trees are in the same family as the Redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens) we saw on the coast close to Crescent city (See Crater Lake Blog). These trees are usually shorter and fatter than the redwoods on the coast. When these trees fall down due to natural causes, they obviously leave gigantic carcasses. Often, the national park service will simply put the path rought through the dead tree like you see above.

This is General Sherman. This is the largest (by volume) living thing on the planet. Yes, some trees are taller, and yes, some trees have a larger base but this tree is the largest by volume. This tree grows in the Giant Forest which contains 5 out of the 10 largest trees in the world. Another notable tree in the Grant Grove is the General Grant which stands 268 feet tall. President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed this tree the "Nation's Christmas Tree" in 1926. It is also the only living object to be declared a "National Shrine", a memorial to those who died in war, so proclaimed on March 29, 1956 by president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Here is Michelle and I and the General Sherman. Check out the facts about General Sherman in the picture below. This is one of the places Michelle and I visited when she came.
As we left the part, we were stuck with an excelent view. I didn't know whe had traveled to heights greater than 6,000 feet as we entered the park. As we were driving out, I put my car in neutral and cruised down the mountain. I didn't use the gas at all for about 25 minutes total. we dropped back down to almost seal level.
This was an excellent adventure. I am very happy I got to see this park.