Mar 19 in blog
Written by: Steven Taylor
Many of you may already know that my wife and I decided to take a trip to California to attend a friend’s wedding reception and make use of our time share points before we lose them. The past couple of days have been interesting to say the least… Because we’re flying standby, our travel arrangements need to be somewhat flexible. Our original intent was to leave Friday AM and return on Friday. Friday’s flights were all booked up, so we left a day early so we didn’t miss the wedding reception. We left bright and early on Thursday morning – 4:30am to be exact. We drove from Akron to Pittsburgh to pick up the first portion of our flight that left at 9:30am. We’re flying standby, so we didn’t have seat assignments until just a few minutes before boarding. We flew into Boston from Pittsburgh – quite the place to be on St. Patrick’s Day. Our layover was for 5 1/2 hours, so we left the airport and took the train into what’s called the Aquarium area.
We stopped at Quincy Market and went to an Irish Pub for lunch. We ordered a St. Patty’s sampler and a corned beef sandwich and split it all – it was pretty good! Quincy Market is also home to a replica of the Cheers Bar, so of course we checked that out for a moment just to say we did. We didn’t want to push it, so we headed back to the airport and just played on the internet for a couple hours until we boarded our flight to San Jose, CA. This time we got seats with “More Legroom” (we flew jetBlue – AWESOME service there). Good thing we had more legroom, too; because the wife and I were quite antsy with a 6.5 hour flight from Boston.
Once we made it into San Jose, I noticed how many ads there were for IT companies in the airport. Once we got our rental car (Mitsubishi Galant) and started driving around I saw places like McAfee, Yahoo!, Avaya, Citrix – all major computer brands. I realized we had flown into Silicone Valley. I’ve never been the kind of person to get excited over meeting somebody famous, but I felt like I was in Hollywood seeing all of these headquarter buildings at once. Nerdy, right?
While I was playing on the internet earlier in Boston, I went to Priceline.com and booked our room for the night. We stayed at the Hyatt in Santa Clara – 4 star hotel and we got it for 60% off the going rate since I chose my own price. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Priceline.com, you can choose your own price. By doing this, you don’t get to choose exactly which hotel you’re staying at (or flight you take, or car you rent) but you do get to choose what you’re looking for – minimum stars, regions in which you’ll stay, the truly important things. We arrived at our hotel and we were just done with traveling, so I used the valet service on the car, got a steak and went to bed at 11:30pm PST. We were awake and traveling for almost a full day…
The hotel in Santa Clara was just for the night. Once we woke up, we went to IHOP and had stellar food and service compared to the IHOPs around Cleveland/Akron, then began our voyage to Bass Lake. On the way it started raining and we noticed that the wipers smeared the rain instead of getting rid of it – we really had no visibility and when a car went through a puddle on the freeway and covered the windshield with water I decided it was time to call AVIS and see what they can do for us. They wasted an hour of our lives that we will never get back put us into a new car – a Nissan Altima. I like these much better and was instantly more comfortable driving. We noticed the rain still smeared a bit, but nothing like before. Maybe California has nasty rain water? Who knows…
After a 4 hour drive, we finally made it to our resort. The foothills in the Sierra National Forest are an amazing sight and we’re really excited to check out the area over the next few days. The resort is more like a private community within the forest. The road we’re on doesn’t have a name – it’s all numbers out here. We’re literally staying IN the forest – we’re about 4,000 feet above sea level here and just got snow last night, even though down in Fresno and Santa Clara it was 50′s and 60′s. The resort does have high speed internet, but I have to use a device that plugs into any outlet and then into my computer. No Wi-Fi. I guess this next week is a good time to get in touch with nature…
I’m sure I’ll keep you all in the loop as to what we check out while we’re here. Thanks for reading!
Now, that is some funny stuff. But, at least you guys are taking time to smell the roses and notice all the beauty that surrounds you. Plus, it is only 68 degrees here on the first day of spring
God Bless & See you both soon!