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Where’s the best place at SFO to kill an hour? Not the Northwest WorldClub where I’m typing this (although it is a fairly nice lounge - mmm, chocolate chip cookies). No, the best place is the San Francisco Airport Commission Aviation Library & Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum. Who would have thought there is a whole museum in the airport?

The museum is just before security at Concourse A and is a lovely, quiet space with plenty of chairs and lots of interesting exhibits. The museum’s collection is housed in a two story room modelled on the Passenger Waiting Room of the 1937 San Francisco Airport Administration Building. The top floor is an aviation library with over 6,000 books and periodicals. The bottom floor houses different exhibits from the collection. At the moment they have an exhibition on Cathay Pacific on one side and aviation toys on the other. There are some marvellous steel planes and zeppelins.

The museum is open 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM Sunday through Friday, so if you happen to be waiting for a flight around then I thoroughly recommend taking a look.

After a very long week I could do little more than lay around in Huntington Park on Nob Hill today but tonight I caught the F Train to Davies Symphony Hall to see Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in an all Brahms concert. Lief Ove Andsnes played the Second Piano Concerto and the second half was Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.

It was a great concert, despite sitting next to a head nodder and occasional hummer (!) who had an odour that suggested he had just had the Forty Clove Garlic Chicken at the Stinking Rose. MTT conducted the symphony without the score which allowed him the freedom for some truly balletic gestures; sometimes it looked like he was fencing with the violas.

I’ve been in Poznan this last week working with the guys in our Polish office. It’s been a lot of fun and tonight is the first night I’ve got back to the hotel before 10pm.

Monday night saw us drinking Żywiec at the Lizard King pub in the lovely Old Town Square or Stary Ryneck. The square is in the centre of the old town and apart from a couple of communist era cement monstrosities in the middle it is a beautifully colourful collection of Renaissance and Baroque architecture.

Tuesday was ice skating at Bogdanka before finishing up again in Stary Rynek where Radek unsuccessfully attempted to get me to try a bowl of flaki.

Last night we played some pool after work before we all got together at the WZ restaurant for a meal. No amount of encouragement was going to get me to order golonka so I had pierogi which was very nice and seemed to be authentically Polish enough.

It’s been great fun working with and getting to know the Polish guys, and their friends and family, too.

There’s just one thing left. The famous Poznan goats make their appearance at midday so there should be just enough time to see them before my flight tomorrow!

I have added pictures from our recent trip to LA, Las Vegas and San Francisco to the gallery.
I forgot to mention before that we wandered into the Musee Mechanique at Pier 45 in Fisherman’s Wharf while we were in San Francisco. This is a fascinating place that houses one of the world’s largest collections of antique arcade machines. They have a few classic video games like Pole Position which I dropped a few quarters into but mostly they are cabinets containing strange little diaramas with bizarre names such as “The Drunkard’s Dream”, “Bimbo Box” and that old classic “Opium Den“.

Also, I have converted the video of the Fountains of Bellagio into flash and embedded it into my previous post. Do check it out. It was taken on Kathryn’s phone and 320 x 240 pixels doesn’t really do it justice but it does give you more of an idea than still photos. Dancing fountains might sound corny but something about it was just memsmerising to watch.

So, waiting for our delayed flight back to London seems like a good time to post.

Leaving the desert heat of Las Vegas to the east we flew to beautiful San Francisco. Actually, leaving Vegas was a little more eventful than usual as after waiting in a long security line the guard took one look at our tickets and redirected us to Lane Nine… This was a much shorter line which seemed promising although I got a little curious as the people in front of me started stepping through in to what looked like some kind of transporter out of Star Trek or maybe a kind of decontamination chamber.
It turns out we were in the “slightly suspicious” line as we had one way tickets. The transporter turned out to be a bomb detection chamber that blew puffs of air from head to toe. We came through this clean although the manual detection swabs did set off an alarm that flagged Kathryn’s mobile as an explosive device. The guard seemed to buy our story of it being a, you know, telephone and we eventually made it onto the plane.

We flew with Ted which is the budget arm of United Airlines (because they are Uni…Ted. Get it?) They were really good. One of the best bits (if you are kind of nerdy) was you could tune to channel 9 and listen to all the radio traffic. It wasn’t just our plane either; you could hear all the aircraft talking to the various control stations as they passed into the airspace. So it was cool to hear our pilot, “the Greaser”, request permission to perform a 360 over Yosemite National Park to give us a great view of the park and Half Dome.

It was my second visit to San Francisco but Kathryn’s first so we started with a little walking tour of the city. San Francisco was just as cool as I remembered it. On Sunday we hired bikes from Blazing Saddles down at Fisherman’s Wharf (great people, highly recommened) and headed off to bike the bridge. As is often the case, a sea fog was covering San Francisco with the tops of the bridge disappearing into the mist but as soon as we rode out into the Marin County side the fog burned away and the sun was shining.
We rolled down the hill into pretty little Sausalito and had fish and chips by the water with a fantastic view back to San Francisco. Kathryn was loving the bike ride and the weather was so nice we decided to push on and do the whole sixteen miles round to Tiburon. This took pretty much the whole day and we caught the ferry from there back to San Francisco.

On Monday we went to Alcatraz. I didn’t get to the Rock last time as it was closed but this was a fascinating trip. They have an excellent audio guide that is narrated by ex-Alcatraz guards and inmates. Before it became the most notorious prison in the USA it was a military fort. For thirty years from 1933 the most “incorrigible” prisoners were transferred to Alcatraz. In fact it turns out that many prisoners felt conditions at Alcatraz were better than other Federal prisons (like only one inmate to a cell). The tour guides you around the main cell block and describes the life of the prisoners and guards as well as describing some of the famous inmates and escape attempts. Make sure you book in advance but definitely recommended.

That night we ate at what has become a San Francisco institution; the House of Nanking. We got there fairly early so there was only a short queue and we got to go straight in. It was packed inside, though. It has a reputation of having excellent food and bad service and I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get the usual first-timer treatment. Apparently, the owner will usually ask if it is your first time there and if so not allow you to order from the menu but instead choose whatever they think you should get. Maybe we looked like locals. It didn’t matter. We had pork egg rolls and the Nanking Special sesame chicken. The food was great and the service was acceptably bad delivered with little more than a “Chicken. Rice coming!” followed by a bowl of rice being dumped on the table with a brief “rice!” Don’t come here for a relaxing meal but if you want great tasting and reasonably priced Chinese food it’s definitely recommended.

Las Vegas was cool.

We stayed at the Bellagio, which was nice. Every casino on the Strip has its “thing”; Caesar’s has statues that come alive and move and talk and wield flaming swords, the Venetian has an indoor/outdoor canal complete with gondola rides under the Rialto Bridge, New York New York has a re-creation of Manhattan and the Paris Las Vegas has the Eiffel Tower. The Bellagio is a little classier than others and has a huge lake out the front with fountains that are choreographed to music (remember this is in the middle of the desert). This was the casino that Danny Ocean and his 11 hit in the 2001 remake, and the fountains are featured at the end of the film.

The hotel itself was a fascinating place. From the huge lobby with its ceiling covered in two thousand hand-blown glass flowers to the expansive gaming floor the place was always bustling with all kinds of people. From high-rollers in suits to average looking people in shorts and t-shirts. The quality of food and service was uniformly excellent.

On our second night we saw Cirque du Soleil’s aquatic themed ‘O’ which is performed above, on and in a specially designed theatre in the casino. This show was an amazing mix of acrobatics, synchronised swimming and fire dancing. The cast were so spectacularly at home in the water they seemed more like sea monkeys or some kind of aquatic aliens.

Yesterday morning we departed a slightly damp Heathrow airport and approximately ten hours later we landed in sunny southern California.

As they say, nobody walks in Los Angeles so we collected our hire car from the massive Hertz lot and headed out onto the famous LA freeways. Once I’d got over that initial weirdness that comes from driving on the right/wrong side of the road it wasn’t so bad.

Our hotel is nice. It’s the W in Westwood, a pleasant district just west of Beverly Hills and home to UCLA.

I suppose it was appropriate that our first stop in LA was Hollywood Boulevard to check out the Walk of Stars and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre the forecourt of which is covered in feet and hand prints of lots of famous actors stretching back more than sixty years - from Humphry Bogart to Harrison Ford. The cinema opened in 1927 and has been the location of many premieres and even two Academy Award shows although they now take place in the massive Kodak Theatre that looms next door. Sid Grauman, who died in 1950, seems to have been well liked as a number of the cement slabs out the front bear personal inscriptions to him.

As the sun was setting over the Pacific we headed for the beach at Santa Monica and burgers at Jonny Rockets.

Today we spent the whole day at Universal Studios taking the VIP tour of the studio / theme park. The place is massive and in fact is its own little city called Universal City. It has its own Fire Station, shops and has so many cars it has its own DMV office. Universal Studios was started by Carl Laemmle in 1914 when he purchased a chicken ranch in the San Fernando Valley and since the very beginning has been running tours.

We had a great time and although it’s pricy I would recommend the VIP Experience tickets. They only run small groups so you need to book in advance but you get a guide who takes you round the whole park and you get to go to the front of the queue on all the attractions. No waiting in lines! Our guide, Will, was fantastic. We hit the rides straight away with a thorough soaking on the Jurassic Park ride followed in quick succession buy the rather disorientating Mummy Returns indoor roller coaster and then drying off in the highly inflammable Backdraft show.

After the rides we saw the spectacular Water World show. This was basically Kevin Costner’s Waterworld condensed into about twenty minutes and performed by stunt men and women who drove boats, jumped jet skis and leapt off tall things into the water below while on fire. In fact there was a lot of pyrotechnics the climax of which was a plane that explodes over the scenery before landing in the water.

After lunch (included with the VIP pass) we went on a private tour of the actual studio back lot which is used for filming. This was really interesting and with the VIP pass you get to get off the little tram and walk around. Particularly interesting was the props department; a huge warehouse with aisle after aisle of everything you might need in a film. One row was nothing but phones, while another might have toasters and yet another would be filled with different kinds of shovels or fire extinguishers. It was fascinating and I would have liked to have spent more time in there seeking out famous props like the hoverboard used in Back to the Future II.

We finished the VIP experience with a couple of 3D films: Shrek 4D and Terminator 2. The Terminator show was a clever mix of live action and 3D film (and lots of smoke, gun fire and general noisiness).

It was a long day but it never got boring. Our guide was great and I would definitely recommend it for the whole Hollywood experience.

I used the cool Pandora plugin for the GIMP to make this panorama of a 360 degree view from the top of Rannerdale Knotts in the Lake District.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work too well at a small size as the original is 16,654 pixels wide!

Over the long weekend we drove up to the beautiful Lake District and stayed in the beautiful Southerdale Cottage.

We managed to avoid the traditional lousy weather that London received and had great weather for a couple of walks from the really excellent Jarrold Short Walks book. We love walking in the Lake District. It’s a long drive from London but it is so totally relaxing it always recharges your batteries.

On the Saturday we had fantastic weather and the walk up to Castle Crag was reasonably busy. We started in the tiny village of Seatoller beneath the terrifyingly bleak Honister Pass; one of the highest passes in Cumbria with a road gradient of 25%.

Castle Crag is less than 1000ft but Alfred Wainright in his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells described it as:

…magnificently independent, so ruggedly individual, so aggressively unashamed of its lack of inches…

It is thought it used to be an ancient hill fort and it was given to the National Trust by Sir William Hamer in memory of his son who was killed in the First World War. At one time it was a slate quarry and the ascent involves a climb up a huge pile of slate. The summit has great views of Derwent Water and Borrowdale and according to Thomas West in his Guide to the Lake published in 1778:

From the summit of the rock the views are so singularly great and pleasing that they ought never to be omitted.

The way back to Seatoller follows the crystal clear Derwent River through Low Hows Wood.

On the Sunday the sky looked a bit rainier so we were practically on our own walking up the beautiful Rannerdale to the spectacular ridge leading to Rannerdale Knotts.

In 1066 the locals of Rannerdale mounted a resistance to the Norman Invasion. Led by the Earl Boethar, the Normans were drawn into the valley and slaughtered by the native Britons. The bluebells that grow in the valley are said to have sprung from the blood of the slain Norman soldiers.

The climb up Rannerdale was windy and occasionally rainy but the view of Crummock Water and Buttermere from the ridge was absolutely stunning. The low grey clouds that were sweeping across the fells made it look like we were staring into Mordor.

Kathryn found a secluded spot overlooking Buttermere just as the sun broke free and the wind became calm. It was the most perfect lunch.

We also took the time to visit a couple of National Trust properties. On the way up we stopped at Waddesdon Manor - a huge French château dropped into rural Buckinghamshire. Built by the literally minted Rothschilds in the 19th Century on land bought from the Duke of Marlborough it contains an impressive load of the Rothschilds’ fabulous collection including paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds, Sèvres porcelain, Beauvais tapestries and a large number of French secretaires and roll-top desks. Queen Victoria visited in 1890.

On the way south we stopped at Charlecote Park; a (very) slightly more modest Tudor manor house on the banks of the Avon near Stratford. According to legend, Stratford’s most famous resident was caught stealing deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park and years later he took his revenge by portraying Sir Thomas as the fussy Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Like a lot of National Trust properties, Charlecote Park is still lived in by the current descendants of the original Lucy Family. Baronet Sir Edmund Fairfax-Lucy lives there now, presumably in one of those areas we’re not allowed to see. Interestingly, during the depression of the 1870s Henry Spencer Lucy (a crack shot with the 12 gauge) was forced to sell many of the more valuable Old Masters, some to Lionel de Rothschild around 1875.

There are more pictures in the gallery.

I’ve managed to get gallery2 integrated into wordpress in at least a half-decent way. At the moment there is no dedicated link to the gallery but you can get there by clicking on the random picture displayed in the sidebar and then clicking your way around. I suppose you could also click on this link.

There are pictures from my recent trip to California for the MySQL Users Conference in there. Actually they are mostly from San Francisco as there isn’t much to take photos of in Silicon Valley.

If you are wondering what all the pictures of cars are, on my last day I stumbled upon the start of the California Mille. This is a famous classic car rally inspired by the old Mille Miglia (1000 miles) run in Italy from 1927 to 1957. To take part in the California Mille, your car must have either run or have been elligible to run in the original Mille. Not only that, it costs $4,000 and your car has to be chosen as among the best of the applicants.

I was planning on killing the few hours before my flight by sitting in the lovely park at the top of Nob Hill but as I arrived at the Fairmont Hotel I was greeted by the sights and sounds of rows of Alfas, Porsches, Fiats and Ferraris. There were some amazing cars there including quite a few gull-winged Mercedes 300SLs, a strange Fiat 8V from Australia, and an absolutely stunning Ferrari 250GT California. So I spent the next couple of hours taking pictures of cars until my batteries died.