travelweasel

I’m staying at the City Center Hostelling International in San Francisco. It’s located in the Tenderloin, which has the reputation of the area to stay out of. This is mostly because of the large homeless population, and I do not feel that the area is any more dangerous than the Red Light District, which is where the popular Green Tortoise is located.  Anyway the hostel is pretty great. Staff are very friendly and helpful and the rooms have just four beds, a bathroom and a closet! My only complaint here is that there is only one light in the room, so if one person is up everyone is. Free breakfast means bagels, toast, OJ, tea and coffee (all day), and fruit and cream cheese for an extra $.50 (which I think is sort of lame).Also the place is full of French high schoolers who are here to study English. They aren’t so bad, but are hard to communicate with. Today, on Thanksgiving, they were trying to bake two turkeys. At 5:00 pm they had just started to defrost it, and were arguing over whether they could do so in the microwave (the thing didn’t end up fitting in the microwave.) I think it’s still cooking now. 

We stayed in the Green Tortoise on Broadway. In the heart of the Red Light District, on the cusp on Chinatown and North Beach. The Red Light District consists mostly of big strip joints with leery bouncers who stand outside and try to get people to come in. I wasn’t scared to walk around because the area is full of people. But maybe I should have been. The windows of our rental car were smashed and a big red suitcase was taken - we were just lucky there was nothing of value in it.  The next night a man was shot in the back right outside the hostel. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/26/BA3A14C1V6.DTL&hw=broadway&sn=009&sc=228He died.I think I’m going to move to a different hostel.  

We drove south on Route 1 and found our way to Stinson Beach. We had planned on staying at the Point Reyes Hostel, but the manager was so rude that we turned our car around without ever having gotten out.The Stinson Beach Motel was the perfect solution, and the tanned, bermuda short wearing owner who could not have been friendlier. For $85 we had a small, clean room with an incredible mattress that was just minutes from the beach. In fact, we walked to the beach in the dark that night. The Milky Way shone and I made out four of the Seven Sisters. The beach is wide and flat, but there’s always a thrill to being on the beach at night, especially a beach you’ve never been to before. Friends in Portland recommended the Sand Dollar Restaurant. We went for dinner and there was a live guitar and piano player. The food was decent and moderately priced.  It’s a tiny beach town, but it’s also obvious you’re just an hour north of San Francisco.   

I use the SpeakEasy Voice Recorder application to record audio from my Iphone. The app cost $1.99 but was well worth the cost for the ease of use, and the feature of being able to get recordings onto your computer.1. Go to the SpeakEasy Voice Recorder website and download the free application that will get the files off the Iphone.2. Plug in the Iphone, back it up, sync the apps, and run the program you just downloaded.3. The files will be uploaded to your computer in M4a format. In order to get them onto my blog I needed MP3 format, so I downloaded a converter (http://www.nch.com.au/switch/plus.html).4. Once the files were in MP3 format I needed to find a file host to upload the audio to. After trying a few that didn’t work I got to www.mediafire.com, which thankfully did work.5. I uploaded my files to mediafire, and then inserted the links provided by mediafire into my blog. Unfortunately readers will have to click the link and download the file themselves to play it, but at least it works!

We arrived in Ashland at night and immediately checked in the Ashland Hostel. The Hostel was very clean and centrally located, and the man who checked us in wore a tight black work-out shirt and running pants. An unusual look for someone of his age. The shirt was a little two short and showed off his stomach, which looked like it was fit under the layer of fat. Anyway he must have been fit because he carried both our suitcases up the staircase at one time.There wasn’t much doing in Ashland. Ashland is known for its summertime Shakespeare festival. There are multiple stages and actors and tourists fill the town. Although the weather was pleasant you might have thought it was the dead of winter because there was no one there. The shops and restaurants were deserted. We left after an overpriced breakfast in the morning.  

We had a delightful stay at the Driftwood Motel in Newport, Oregon. On the first night we stayed in the cheapest room for $65/night and had a breathtaking ocean view and kitchenette. November is the off season so the place was empty. I guess November is normally rainy, but we had beautiful weather all three days. The manager offered on the second night to move us upstairs to a room with a full kitchen and the nicest view in the place. From upstairs we could see nothing but the great Pacific and a lighthouse to the left, and could hear only the waves.  I woke up this morning to the sight of the sea and what a way to wake up!If you ever drive Route 101 in Oregon stop at the Driftwood Motel.  

The thing about the pug is that it absolutely could not survive in the wild. When it gets too fat, its face-fat blocks the breathing passages and it suffocates. When it gets winded it wheezes uncontrollably. When it gets too excited its eyes pop out! And its not a smart dog either. It’ll chase its own tail for hours. The animal is an evolutionary nightmare, and yet it survives and reproduces because people think pugs are adorable and hilarious. I used to disagree. The grown pug is hideous. But then I met a pug who had four baby pugs. And my goodness those puppies were cute. They sold like hot cakes.  Just look at the pictures.    

We’re staying at the Hawthorne House Hostel in the Bohemian District of Portland. Everything about the place, and the area, is Bohemian. Hawthorne Street is full of theaters, vintage clothing shops, cafes, buskers and various types of peddlers. People ride around on their bikes and say, “Hello” to each other on the street. We’re just a mile from the center of the city, but it almost feels like being in a small town. The hostel is proudly “Green”- the toilet water is recycled from the rain that falls on the roof, and the electricity is harvested from the reverberations of sound made by snoring guests. Breakfast is not free. Neither is coffee. The dorms are large, and the beds do not have individual lights, so if one person needs light, the whole room gets light.  The people staying at the hostel are friendly and interesting. 

Everyone in Seattle owns, and usually carries around, three items: a rain coat, an umbrella, and a pair of rain boots. And you should see the variety they come in! Sold in every shop, on every street corner.I was impressed by the fashion sense of Seattle-ites. Well, impressed considering the conditions, and the conditions are Rain. It isn’t always pouring rain in Seattle - if it was, people probably just wouldn’t go outside. It’s more like walking around in a cloud. Sometimes it’s misty, and sometimes the mist coagulates to make little rain drops. So there isn’t a good excuse to stay inside, but it’s a good idea to be prepared for precipitation. And the good people of Seattle are. I personally hate these rubberized rain necessities. I think they’re ugly, and I don’t think that ugliness should be ignored or covered up by bright flowers or polka-dots. I think the ugliness of rain gear should be embraced by designs that make the items more ugly so that they can perhaps become so ugly that they’re actually interesting to look at. It’s like trying to hide a bad smell with air freshener - it just makes things worse. You might as well just smell the smell for what it is. Not sure if that made any sense, but my point is that the most fashionable people in Seattle wear rain gear that is deliberately ugly. 

There are currently only two hostels in Seattle, the Green Tortoise, located downtown, (www.greentortoise.net) and Hostel Seattle, in Ballard, (www.hostelseattle.com.)For the backpacker, this means two things: 1. Book in advance, especially on weekends.2. Expect to pay more for your bed ($25-35.)  According to a cabbie, there used to be a Hosteling International but they got kicked out of their building by corporate monsters and never bothered reopening. My mom and I decided to stay at Hostel Seattle in Ballard because it was cheaper than the Green Tortoise, and because I had had mixed experiences at the Green Tortoise in San Francisco.Ballard is a nice waterfront town filled with little shops and intersected by a bike/walking path that leads through Fremont and into the city. Not that you would want to walk into the city. It takes about 45 minutes to get to downtown from the hostel (a ten minute walk to the 17 Bus, a fifteen minute wait for the bus, then a twenty minute ride in.) So if you want to be in the city, go to the Green Tortoise.The hostel itself is clean, well-run and cozy. There’s a small, well-kept kitchen with a broken stove and small-fridge. My only complaint here is that there are no cupboards for guests to keep their food. We’re staying in the hostel’s only private room, which costs $60 a night. Two dorm beds would have run us $50, and there are about a dozen dorm beds in each of three large rooms.The manager is friendly, and if you ask him (or even if you don’t), he’ll give you a map and circle all the big tourist attractions. Personally, I’m not too interested in the tourist attractions, but it’s nice to know they’re there.