San Francisco Trip
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Matthew
Stibbe's Homepage
San Francisco Trip
San Francisco |
Summary:
In August 2002, I went to San Francisco for a month's working holiday. These pages record some of impressions the trip made on me .
A star batter gets an award for hitting 600 runs or not (I don't remember)
On 24th August, my friend Carl took me to a baseball game. It was the first stadium sports game of any kind I had seen and it was fun. I liked the garlic fries and the beer and the sitting down. Baseball is a game of extraordinary athleticism but everything happens in nanosecond bursts of activity. It's like the scene in Awakenings where all the catatonic patients are playing cards and nobody moves for hours and then, in a flash, the whole hand is played out in seconds. The people in the seats around me took great delight in explaining how the game worked to an obvious neophyte. If I had a Phd in statistics and a a masters in law I might have made sense of it. "Martinez hit the ball to the hotdog stand on left field and he gets to invoke the Mornington Crescent rule but the pitcher's left toe was curled so it's a no ball." Or something.
In a bookshop I came across a book for kids with a weird Wednesday Adams type girl on the cover, posed in the style of Gen. Kitchener's WWI recruitment poster, saying "I want you ... to leave me alone." Reminds me of the game developers badge I bought once which read "What I want is more money and power, and less shit from you people."
My diary says "Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions [Aristotle]." Seems like a good idea.
The Katana I flew from San Carlos to Gnoss
I went flying twice. I had hoped to fly more but just before I left, the FAA introduced new rules about foreign pilots flying in the US. This meant that I couldn't get a temporary airman's certificate. About a month after I got home all the bureaucracy and SNAFUs got cleared up and they were issuing certificates again but too late for me. The consequence was that I had to pay for an instructor to come with me, even though I was capable of flying the plane and all the rest (I did half my training in Florida, so I knew about flying in the US). The consequence was that it was harder to schedule and more expensive to fly and, in the end, I did about 4.5 hours instead of the 10 or so I had planned.
Flying over the Bay, view West to the Golden Gate Bridge
My favourite flight was from San Carlos (KSQL) in Silicon Valley up highway 101, over San Francisco, over the bay and North past Sausalito towards the Napa valley. I flew touch and goes there in the little DA-20 Katana from Diamond Aviation (the best operator of the three I've encountered in the Bay area) . It's a fun little plane with amazing views. It's not much good in the UK because it can't be certified for IMC and the composite construction makes de-icing a real problem in the winter. Otherwise, it would be a really popular, economical plane to own.
Flying in the US is much more relaxed than in the UK. I got the same sort of service out of San Francisco Tower (i.e. the control tower for SFO international airport) as I get out of Denham Information. If I called up Heathrow tower and asked for an overhead transit I'd probably get shot down. It was an interesting experience flying such a light aircraft in heavy crosswinds. During the circuits, I would guess the crosswind component was 12-15 knots and gusting and coming back into SQL I had to crab about 30 degrees into wind just to maintain the ground track over 101 because of the onshore breeze and mountain winds.