Sunday July 24, 2011
I was asked to attend the HITEC Conference in San Francisco in 2011. This blog will mostly be about events not at the HITEC Conference. We were able to get cheaper airplane tickets by flying out at 7 AM with Southwest Air. This enabled us to have a free day of site seeing on Sunday. The flight out was rather nice and I always get a window seat because it helps me avoid motion sickness.
We got up at 4 AM and met my boss who drove to the airport in Minneapolis Terminal 2. We then flew to San Francisco airport. We took the BART downtown which is sort of a metro system. $8.10 to go from the airport downtown.
This took us to downtown SF.
Mark and I were able to check into our room early but Kurt and Ruth weren't able to. Here is a shot of the lobby of the Hyatt Regency where the conference was held.
Afterwards we split up since Kurt and Ruth were going to see a baseball game, Mark and I walked down to the information booth on Market Street where you could buy MUNI passes. I convinced Mark we should get 7 day passes to make it easier to get around. I later looked at mine and they had sold me a one day pass. Anyway it turned out that the passes weren't that great of a deal because we ended up either spending most of the time at the conference or walking.
Mark and I first went down to Fisherman's Wharf. I thought we should get that out of the way first besides it was nearly lunch time and I wanted to get something to eat (2-3 PM Wisconsin time). We walked past all the vendors on the Wharf and finally decided to eat at
Lou's Blues Club. Mark had the blackened snapper and I had the shrimp fettuccine.
He didn't realize it was going to be a sandwich from the description. It was an OK dining experience. Later we started using Google to find the best restaurants. We did some site seeing at the Wharf.
We next got on a bus to take us over to Haight Ashbury we thought we would check out a music store. I had been thinking about getting some Tablas and I read that they had them at this store. We went to
Haight Ashbury Music. I tried the tablas but I was not able to get the signature sound out of them with my playing and became somewhat skeptical that I would ever be able to learn how to play them. We wandered into the back where naturally I was attracted to the synthesizers. There was a kid playing on the Mini Moog Voyager so I started playing it after he left. Then a manager came in and chased us all out of the little keyboard room and locked it up. He then went through the store commenting to the other customers that they had to have a salesman work with them to play any instruments. I was used to going to Guitar Center where they pretty much just let you play on stuff so I was sort of put off by this guy. He may have been the owner, not sure. So we left the store.
We then started walking towards the Golden Gate Park but we weren't sure how far it was or if we were going in the right direction so we asked someone and yes, it was just a couple more blocks.
This is a nice park.
There were some holly trees growing here.
There was a group of musicians playing drums in the park. I had my A Hering Chromatic with me so I took it out and started jamming with the band for a while.
We also passed through the AIDS memorial grove that makes up the first part of the park.
We had set as a goal to reach the Japanese Tea Garden and we finally made it.
