This tsunami evacuation route sign is in the little downtown area of Cannon Beach. In 1964 an earthquake in Alaska triggered a tsunami that reached a height of almost 13 ft (4 m) at Seaview, Washington. Geological evidence also shows that around 1700 a powerful earthquake (magnitude 8 to 9) and large tsunami hit Washington’s coastline.This late afternoon picture is from a viewpoint on the west shoulder of Neahkahnie Mountain, looking south. We’re on a cliff about 1,661 ft (506 m) above sea level.This is Saturday morning on my drive back to Seattle. The Abominable Snowman advertises coffee from the little orange espresso stand behind it.Before I went onto the bridge, I drove up a hill overlooking the Columbia river and the Astoria-Megler bridge. (I am looking north toward Washington State on the other side). The main span is a 2,468-foot steel cantilever through truss, and is flanked by five steel deck trusses, and one hundred forty 80-foot concrete deck girder spans.Here is a picture taken by someone while crossing the bridge.
We checked out the town of Cannon Beach on Friday after visiting Hug Point.
I started back to Seattle on Saturday and I crossed the Astoria-Megler Bridge again. I stopped to take more pictures of it.
The bridge stretches 4.1 mi (6.6 km) from Astoria, Oregon, across the mouth of the Columbia River, to Point Ellice, Washington. The bridge replaced previous ferry lines running from Astoria to Washington. Construction on the bridge began in 1962 and it was formally dedicated August 27, 1966. The bridge was initially a toll bridge, but by 1993, the bridge had been paid off and the toll was removed.
[From Wikipedia] A stagecoach low on a carved-out road at the Hug Point. The rocks and the road surface are still there today.In this panorama, Hug Point is on the far left. There are caves in the cliff sides, and a little seasonal stream and waterfall as well (in the middle).
We drove a little up and down the northern Oregon coast on Friday. When I saw the signs for a turn-out to ‘Hug Point State Recreation Area’, I suggested we stop and go check it out.
I later learned that the name comes from 19th century stagecoach drivers that used the beach as a highway, and they had to ‘hug’ this particular point even at low tide to get around it.
I’m trying not to get my shoes and socks wet! (Yes – I should have just taken them off and walked through, but the water is icily cold).One of the cavernous spaces in the cliff-side. My friend Tony had to use the flash on my camera to light me up. At high tide the cave fills half-way up with water.
This I a alongside the Chehalis river in a town called South Bend.
I drove down to the Oregon coast on Thursday, to a little town called Manzanita to stay with friends for a day or two. Here are some pictures I took on the way down.
Here’s the Astoria-megler bridge. This sign is on the Oregon side.I like the name ‘Dismal Nitch’. This is the last stop on the Columbia river before crossing over it into Oregon.A tribute to the history of the local Indian peoples. This is also in South Bend.The drive came to about 5 hrs with stops.
I love this retro sign on board the ferry. The ferries all have names and ours was the Walla Walla (I couldn’t find out what the M.V. stands for). Walla Walla is a native American (Indian) name and means ‘place of many waters’.
We headed back to the mainland on Friday, taking the ferry from Kingston to Edmonds this time. It’s a short crossing – only 30 minutes. The sun had come out by the time we set sail, but it was still very chilly on the upper deck !
These giant gnome wood carvings are at a filling station in Kingston. Gas goes for as low as $2.29/ gallon on Kitsap Peninsula. Here we had just left the Kingston ferry terminal. Only a few brave souls ventured out onto the decks.
Thursday comes quickly when you are busy, and we were very busy this week, trying to squeeze in a last few hours of work before bidding each other a nice holiday on Thursday as we headed out to the airport. It would be Monday January 5 before the project team convenes again and take up our challenges. First, it is time to go home and take a break.
We are on our way to the airport for one last Thursday in 2014. Here is San Francisco Bay from the San Mateo bridge, looking north.
The airport was surprisingly full of travelers on Monday morning – that did not know what to do, or where to go (so they were infrequent travelers, and in a way I envy them). Maybe some of them were in Seattle for the Seahawks-San Francisco 49ers football game (the Seahawks beat the 49ers again). My flight was delayed again, and by the time we were in the air it was almost 10.00 am. There was fog and rainy weather in San Francisco, and they had to close one of the runways.
The winter sun had been up for a long time by the time we boarded our Alaska Air flying machine for San Francisco.
I just stepped off the BART train, and just beyond the turnstiles is San Francisco airport’s International Terminal. It is very convenient for me, since Alaska Airlines fly out of the International Terminal as well.
The West Coast was getting soaked with rain today. I did not have a rental car for the week – a good thing, since I could take the train and not worry about accidents and flooding on the freeways.
My Alaska Airlines flight made it out of San Francisco airport after a delay of an hour or so. It was a choppy take-off in San Francisco, with no in-flight beverage service and a bumpy landing in Seattle! Yikes. I guess we are all a little spoiled with smooth flying. Not used to flying in rough weather.
36 minutes to departure at 7.10 am .. the countdown sign at the entrance to the Alaska Airlines airplane.
It’s always flight 222 on Monday mornings to San Franscisco for me : an easy number to remember. Flight numbers are usually taken out of use after a crash or a serious incident, and the lower numbers are used for premium flights. So is there an Alaska Airlines Flight 1? Why, yes. It’s the flight that departs Washington, D.C. every day at 8 am, for Seattle.
It’s back to San Francisco tomorrow, and so my bags are packed. I see I missed a story last week of a woman that brought her ’emotional support’ pig onto an airplane in Connecticut. (The pig ended up not flying; see the report from ABC News > here). Since I don’t have a pig to take traveling with me, I will confess that back when I traveled to China for three weeks at a time, I would take a book that I loved, and would make very sure I have my iPad with my TIME magazines downloaded and my favorite music on it, though. (To ’emotionally support’ me while traveling).
Alaska Airlines still uses the classic paper boarding pass paper stock at San Francisco airport and (looks to me) a main-frame program to print the details. The ELECTRONIC only means the ticket is electronic. (I’m old enough to remember the days when the gate attendant would rip off the top part of a paper ticket and hand the carbon copy below it back to the passenger). I could certainly go with an electronic boarding pass as well : the square bar code from the Alaska Airlines app on my mobile phone. But with the paper boarding pass I can ‘scoff’ at (scoff back at?) the tech geeks fresh from doing business in Silicon Valley, that fly back to Seattle with me. I read in my Bloomberg Businessweek that paper coupons for packaged goods at the grocery store and elsewhere are thriving – even in this age of smartphones and electronics. People just love to clip them out and take them to the store. Will paper ever go away completely? Not any time soon.
A familiar sight for me by now : the British Air 747 taxiing out to fly to London. The Japan Airlines plane (tail on the far right) was to depart for Tokyo’s Haneida airport soon after. It rained all day in San Francisco on Thursday.
I left San Francisco a little earlier than my regular Thursday time .. or should I say I tried : our flight was delayed by about an hour.
Then we seemed to take the longest time I could remember ever, to get onto the plane. A long line of us lounged in the jet way for an interminable time. My fellow travelers actually remarked about it as well. What is going on in there? As Miranda Priestly (character from The Devil Wears Prada, played by Meryl Streep) would say : By all means move at a glacial pace, you know how that thrills me.
Here’s a 747 from British Airways right next to the gate I flew out of this afternoon, at San Francisco airport, just getting pushed back. It flies to London’s Heathrow airport (of course), all across the continental USA and the Atlantic.
I am staying over in downtown San Francisco tonight. I have to attend a mandatory ‘Talent Transformation’ session hosted by my Firm. Here are some pictures I took early evening on Powell Street.
No, it’s not the ’70s. It’s a BART station display board ad for the new Volkswagen Golf. I recognize the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, and the TransAmerica Building in the picture.Here’s the corner of Powell St and O’Farrell St. I love the green art deco building. I’m not sure of its history but I hope it can bear now being a sneaker store!Here’s the Powell/ Market St Trolley (taking a break before loading up with passengers). There is a turn-around at Market St : the car turns 360°C and goes right back the way it came.Check out the rainbow-colors on the lighted stairs inside the Union Square Uniqlo store. The store has a wide selection of clothes at great prices, and I bought two shirts and a sweater.
As I’m settling into my seat on the wing of the Alaskan Airlines 737, I thought : What a strange airplane over there .. is that the Portland Timbers Airline?.. but no, it was an Alaskan Airlines 737, wearing a ‘soccer jersey’ of the Portland Timbers soccer team. Mystery solved. (Photo by Bruce Ely / The Oregonian)
I made it out to San Francisco with my regular Monday morning fly-out. My airplane still fills up completely, even though there seem to be a lot fewer people in the airport. The airlines surely reduce the number of flights this time of year. (But I am sure they add flights back onto the schedule for the upcoming Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays).
I’m just stepping into the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 at San Francisco airport.I’m in the passenger seat, so I can snap pictures like a tourist while my colleague is driving. This is the new section of the Bay Bridge that runs into downtown San Francisco from the east. The old section of bridge is still being dismantled.
It’s only Thursday, but it’s been a long week already! But hey – we were allowed to go home and not required to stay overnight to work on our documents. I thought it best to get out of there today as well .. I think the city will come to a standstill for some time tomorrow with the planned parade for the San Francisco Giants.
We were all glad to call this week’s trip out to the project office good, and get out of there. I drove my little rental car out to San Francisco International Airport across the San Mateo Bridge, dropped it off at Hertz, and stood in line at TSA’s security check point. I hate those big millimeter wave scanners; they have those at SFO. (The ones where you step into a giant cylinder, do a Hands up! and hold still while the machine does a whole-body image scan).
I’m sitting in 27A in the tail of our Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400, checking out the British Air 747. ‘I’m not going if it’s not a Boeing’ said a sticker on the flight attendant’s file folder at the main door.
Hmm .. very interesting, I thought, the paint on the Alaska Airlines fuselage, as we stepped into the front door. Could it be a mushroom? What could it be?! I never saw the entire airplane since it was out of sight as I stepped out of it in San Francisco as well.
So I had to resort to an on-line search .. and here is the answer to the mystery. It’s Minnie Mouse’s red polka-dot hair bow. It was a ‘Disneyland’ Alaska Airlines plane that I flew on. Says the DisneyWiki : Minnie Mouse is the girlfriend of Mickey Mouse created by The Walt Disney Company. Minnie is sweet in nature and fun-loving. She is widely recognized by her pink or red polka-dot hair bow.
I found myself spending the last hours of this week’s trip in the Embarcadero again, to attend a meeting. Afterwards I had to run out and take BART to the airport, but managed to snap a few pictures (of course).
I’m standing on the corner of Mission and Fremont St. The building across the block is 100 1st St and belongs to the University of San Francisco. Built as recently in 1988, I see it has a ‘postmodern’ style (which is hard to explain, even after reading up about it!). The blue billboard in the middle quotes Steve Jobs : ‘If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.’And here is a brand new building going up right there at the same street corner, for the global cloud-computing company called Salesforce.com. They are somewhat of a competitor to SAP and as with SAP, whole consulting practices have sprung up, dedicated to help big companies implement their software.
I had just settled into my seat at 20C on the Alaska Air flight out to San Francisco this morning, when a woman with a pink track suit came by, and lifted up a very large garment bag – also pink – into the overhead bins. It filled two whole side-by-side bins, taking up six feet of space! Ahh .. of course, can only be one thing : a wedding dress, I thought. Sure enough, that’s what it is, she confirmed soon after when someone inquired what it was inside.
It’s 6.30 am and I’m sitting in row 20 on the Alaska Air flight at the gate in Seattle.
Here’s the view from my BART train on the way back to the airport today, as we were approaching Daly City, south of San Francisco.
[From Wikipedia] ‘Little Boxes’ is a protest song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963. The song was reportedly inspired by the boxy houses of Daly City and expresses alarm at conformity and loss of individuality. Well, the little boxes are still there today, but I see in writings of historians and sociologists that the people populating them are actually quite diverse with large Filipino and other Asian communities there.
Here are the words for the song.
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
I’m on BART (blue dot) and my way from the airport to The Embarcadero – where my firm’s office and our client’s head office are (red pin).
I finally got to ride on BART today : the veritable and well-ridden by now – Bay Area Rapid Transit – in service since the ’70s and showing it. Taking it to Walnut Creek at rush hour was a crowded, sweaty affair!
The San Francisco Ferry Building was completed in 1898. The clock tower is 245 feet tall. The inside was renovated in 2002, and the ground floor is now filled with restaurants and food shops.Here’s the Bay side of the Embarcadero, and the Bay Bridge. (It is the older western section that connects downtown San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island).This is the gorgeous inside of the Ferry Building, the second floor. The second is mostly empty (not full of stores and people, the way the ground floor is) and a guard wanted to know what I wanted. ‘I want to take a picture’ I said. May I? Yes, no problem, go ahead, he said.Here’s what the BART train looks like. Not too shabby on the outside, right? Most of the BART stations seem very utilitarian, not splashy or with artsy displays at all.
Over lunch time I got to see some of the sights in the Embarcadero area in downtown San Francisco. It was a warm cloudless day. I did not have a lot of time and just walked straight to the waterside to check out the Ferry Building to see the water in the Bay.
