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When In SF, Pace Yourself Peace Friend
December 7th, 2009 by Myer Thompson, under Travel and Leisure. No Comments
No on likes to beat a dead horse. It’s laborious and puts the kibosh on compelling copy. To be sure, San Fran is a super keen city. Yeah, it’s crowded and overpriced and murder to drive through, but there are a fistful of upsides as well. First off, get out of the car and get on the Muni or BART or any number of public transport options on the slate. Driving in Frisco is a fiasco waiting to happen.
Your feet can take you anywhere. Hop a Muni bus, dash onto the BART rail and rest assured you’ll get there with time to spare. I know it’s a cliche now, but, yeah, getting around in San Fran is pretty prosaic. Come on, it’s only seven square miles. Sooner or later, you’re bound to pass something you recognize.
Some quick stats: San Fran is the third-most popular tourist destination in the grand old United States. It’s only out-shined by New York and Los Angeles. Swing a dead cat and you’re bound to hit a tourist spot. There’s Fisherman’s Wharf, the Embarcadero, Union Square, the Golden Gate Bridge, and then the entirety of the East Bay and San Jose and then there’s the Wine Country.
Pace yourself, hombre. If you burn through San Fran too quickly, you’ll end up burning through your budget and begging for an early flight home. The most important piece of the Frisco puzzle is scouring the bevy of swell San Francisco hotels. You want to book yourself into one that is nice enough to spend an entire day in. Trust me, you’ll need the rest.
Look, Fog City is only seven square miles on prime peninsular property. You can knock off two or three spots in a day, easy. From Chinatown to City Lights to the Transamerica Pyramid to the Golden Gate, you can cram in the good times. Stop along the way for a cappuccino and baked good, and then hop to it. Chances are it’s later than your think.
Face it, there are plenty of hotels in San Francisco where you can hold up like a grade B rock star. Do the basic math, budget your stay, and then blow it all on cappuccinos and beau coup crab cakes.
Planes and Rain: Dig Seattle
November 25th, 2009 by Myer Thompson, under Travel and Leisure. No Comments
Sure, the Pacific Northwest is green. Yeah, there are lots of trees. Yeah, it’s lovely. Yeah, it rains a lot — a real lot. It rains so much Seattle is lampooned as Drizzle City. It has consistently ranked among the top 10 most rainiest cities in the United States. If you like rain, if you think it’s romantic, Emerald City is you kind of town.
Hey, it name is a derivation of the name of the native chief, Seatlh. The Duwamish and Suquamish tribes that had inhabited the area for something close to 4,000 years. That’s 4,000 years of harmony shot down the proverbial tubes with the arrival of the first European settlers in’53.
You know how the story goes. By the end of the’th Century, the area was home to a few thousand Europeans. The natives? They were relocated or burned out of their homes. You know, the typical tactics. By’97, Seattle became a hub for the Yukon Gold craze that was sweeping the nation. It was that semi-porous yellow metal that put Seattle on the national map.
When the Gold Rush petered out, the city became a shipbuilding and shipping hub. It was an industrial city, home to the largest west coast shipyard in the country. The builders and tradesmen were so plentiful Seattle would host the first general strike in US history. In fact, all the labor disputes and attempts to break the burgeoning unions meant a good deal of shipbuilding contracts were moved to Los Angeles.
Thanks to it’s strategic location, Seattle manage to lure the aircraft industry right around the end of World War II. The big boy on the block, Boeing was headquartered in Seattle until 2001, when it moved to Chicago. Still, the Emerald City is home to a hefty Boeing presence. That, and Starbucks, Nike, and Hewlett-Packard. Somehow, people manage to stay productive with 226 days a year of cloud cover and rain.
If you’re in town on rain-soaked business that’ll take you longer than the obligatory weekend, book yourself into a corporate housing suite, like the ones affiliated with the Bellevue hotels. After a week, you will be thanking me.