Bodyboarding at Huntington Beach, Los Angeles

Not spending much time blogging, I will just post some photos from a few trips to Los Angeles, spending times at beaches doing Body Boarding, my new found interest thanks to Mai. 

 

SF2G Bike rides from San Francisco to Mountain View

After gaining some basic long rides practice I finally decided to give a shot to the SF2G rides. Given the preparation and practice I had it did look like a stupid idea but some one offered to make it a no-one-left-behind ride and that left me no excuses :)

There a 4 well known/documented routes available from sf2g.com, the Bayway is the considered the simplest one and definitely the one to start with for beginners. The route is pretty easy indeed with mostly flat roads (except for 3 small inclines in the beginning) and also most of the time roads with little risks to bicyclists because of dedicated lanes and less traffic, which comes at the cost of making the directions pretty complicated. Even after doing my second ride already I am not sure I can complete the ride without some one else leading the way.

The route is very scenic and if the weather gets favourable like it did last 2 rides for it, it makes the 42 miles ride of about 3-3:30 hour go by quickly.

On the way waiting for fellow ride to change the tube after a flat

If you are a biker in San Francisco city heading to South Bay feel free to join us on one of these rides. Note that There are other sub-routes of shorter distances like Millbrae to MV and Foster city to MV and such. Visit the website for more details.

Additional fun things: Use "My tracks" app in Android phones to track your path and get detailed stats about the rides.

View Sf2g 2 in a larger map

Sorry not enough photos from this ride, may be using Street view would help :)

Biking fun! My new road bike and accessories

One of the luxuries you can't miss to afford living in the Bay Area is comfortable Cycling workouts. The weather is usually perfect and roads are pretty flat and smooth and quite a few have biking lanes. (Not forgetting to mention Google has recently released biking directions which adds favourably to this experience).

Bike purchase decision
So after discussing with few experienced bikers I decided to buy a good road bike, visited the performance biking shop nearby to realize they didn't sell Trek and then visited the Chain Reactions bicycle store in Redwood city on recommendation that they actually allow you to test ride your bike for 4 miles trail before buying it which is pretty important to decide buying a bike.

In chain reaction shop I tried a couple of bikes as usual as the price went up the feeling seemed to improve :) I also had a strong preference for color of the bike (and therefore looks of it), both these factors concluded on me buying a Trek 2.1 Alpha bike which is a Aluminum frame bike as that seems to be slightly more sturdier than Carbon frames and a good one to start biking. I must say after riding this for about 300 KMs or so I fell in love with this bike and kinda addicted to biking whenever possible.

From Biking

Road Biking shoes and Clip-on Pedals
After I put about 400 KMs or so and figured I am going to take it seriously and bought Road Biking shoes which made me switch the pedal to the Clip-on pedals. After getting them on and trying it I immediately felt I have definitely not thought well enough before deciding, as it was a major change and had a bit of learning curve during which biking became uncomfortable. Including a few falls as you are not accustomed to take off shoes from the pedal while stopping or just can't manage it in time.

This is how the pedal and shoes (with cleats) look like:

Anyways after trying it in the shop for a while and then adjusting the shoes a bit I came out and very soon had a fall :) and then few more later. I then turned to youtube for help and found these two good videos:




Weather has not been that great this winters so biking didn't work very well but its getting better now and last 2-3 weekends I have been pulling good distances. I was able to complete 40 miles in last attempt, which feels pretty good to sustain for a while and then improve upon. More on biking in next post.

Bay Area Salsa Rueda Festival 2010

Bay area Salsa Rueda festival 2010 the second of its kind was held from Feb 18-21st this year in San Francisco. If you a Salsa-Rueda dancer in the Area this is an event you cannot and shouldn't miss. Similar to last year the event offered a whole bunch of 1 hour workshops, evening performance shows by many Rueda groups and live music/DJ party for social dancing later in the evening until late night.

The event went for 4 days adding a day from last year and the excitement was there till the very last moment, though you could see with such intense dancing everyday most ppl were exhausted by Sunday afternoon :) And the Mega Rueda held on Sunday evening didn't turn out to be as much fun as last year. The Google Rueda group had group outing on Saturday, unfortunately not many from the big group could make it.

I have few videos from the event put on Youtube, trying to share some here too:

This year I experimented with the Intermediate class after trying beginners last year. The problem was at many time slots they didn't only had Advanced Rueda class or some other non Rueda workshop. Some one mentioned that based on the feedback last year they had a permanent Beginners' slot guess this years feedback will make sure they have so for Intermediate and Advanced ones too. Anyways in absence of Intermediate classes I decided to try few other things which turned out good experience. Specially some SalsaTon or plain Reggae classes where Marco Ravella from Canada gave some basics of body movements for all Cuban dancing styles with focus on Reggae where they are much more important.

Santa Barbara and LA trip

I just realized I have gotten careless about blogging trips in California. So trying to catch back on some.

Santa Barbara is a city called the American Riviera and has been pretty famous for its scenic beaches though various TV shows and movies. So on a long weekend we decided to give this city a visit. This city is reachable by either taking Highway 101 S like for LA or by the Scenic Highway CA-1 route. We decided to take CA-1 as we had loads of time :) We did trip on the Martin Luther King weekend (Jan 16-18th).

From Santa Barbara and LA trip

From Santa Barbara and LA trip

From Santa Barbara and LA trip

Death Valley National Park trip

From Death Valley National Park

On the Thanksgiving long weekend we had a trip to Death Valley National Park (DV). DV is about 8 hours of driving time away from Mountain View, CA. DV turned out to be great. I have been to couple of national parks earlier like Yosemite and Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park, and also few recreation parks like Muir Woods National monument and Point Reyes, but DV seems to have been the best till now.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

As they say DV is a land of extremes, I have only read about deserts' extreme climate conditions, during this first proper camping experience I felt it. When we reached Death Valley it was about 4:00 PM on Thursday pretty warm, had good sunlight around.then in some time we camped up and by around 5 PM or so things were very different, it got dark, very windy and started getting colder. Within an hour or two I had to put on gloves and head band to feel comfortable outside. Interestingly the second day of the camping we witnessed light showers in the night and early morning.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

We stayed at the Emigrant site where the camping site we took easily accomdated 2 2-3 ppl camp and a 1 2 ppl camping and still had enough space to park cars around to save ourselves from the winds. The camp-site is about 8 miles from the stove-pipe wells village which had an Okay restaurant and a decent a General store. The Restaurant didn't have any decent Veggie dinner but we could find quick to cook food at the General store which they allowed cooking in their microwave.

Next day we went to points of interest around Furnace Creek which included The Badwater, Zebreikies' point, Natural Bridge, Artists Drive, the 20 mule canyon. All of these places are worth the visit. We missed the Golden canyon trek but had enough trekking at other places like Natural Bridge and at the Artists drive.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

The next day we went to the Ranger's station at Stovepipe to figure our what was the next thing to try. We decided to head to Scotty's castle direction but not for the castle but the Ubehebe Crator which is an interesting place to visit. Ubehebe crator isn't very big in size compared to ones I have heard of or seen like the Lonar Crator in Maharatra, India.But interestingly this one allows you to go all the way down to the bottom most point as its not being filled with water and has a nicely lade out though a moderately difficult trek. We did see the castle but beside being a pretty one there is nothing much about it.

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

From Death Valley National Park

As planed earlier we left for Las Vegas after that. Vegas is about 3.5 hours away from Death Valley. The return trip from Las Vegas on Sunday of Thankgiving weekend became a painful one taking about 12-13 hours in stead of 7.5 required during normal timing ours.

On San Francisco's Public Transport

One of my major complains with Bay Area is about its public transport. I specially realized the problem as I have been renting a car on every time I was visiting but after I moved here the car renting looked too expensive to continue (~900 dollar a month).

I am happy to be have been proven wrong at least about San Francisco's public transport.

Finding the route options
So this morning I had to visit a office in San Francisco at 9:00 AM. I figured out ways of transport using Google Transit and SFMuni. Google Transit works well for figuring out route from point to point. As expected routing involved
1) Walking to Cal train Station
2) CalTrain
3) Bus in San Francisco to destination.

Google Transit takes arrive/depart time as an option and I could figure out the right options without looking at too many time tables.

SFMuni website came in handy however as unlike Caltrain the Muni has multiple alternative routes that you can use depending on how much you are willing to walk with a reasonable 1/2 mile walking option I got quite a few buses to choose from.

The Experience
About the transport itself. Well Caltrain experience didn't start very well as it came about 25 minutes late and they asked us to switch platforms twice, but desptite that the train annoucements were helpful and they suggested that At Palo Alto station we can switch to the fast Mini Bullet Cal Train. Doing so we could easily make up for the delay and we did.

In San Francisco after getting down at Cal Train I could catch a single bus (I didn't follow the routing now as I learnt there were quite a few buses) to reach my destination. More interestingly the 2$ ticket issues was valid for next 4.5 hours, so I could use it for multiple return journeys, Muni train and Muni buses. AFAIK you can travel to almost all parts of the city using these two options.

Cost and Time
Overall I spent just 14$ for the round trip. One small point though, the Caltrains frequency varies from 30 minutes (before 11 AM and after 7 PM) to about 1 hour(11 AM to 7 PM), so your trip can get delayed if not planned well. Also it takes the slow train about 70 minutes from Mountain View Downtown to SF station, the faster (baby bullet) takes just 45 minutes.

Carrying Bikes
Carrying bikes in Caltrain is easy, they have two kinds of coaches offering either 24 or 40 cycle carrying capacity. In both my trips the train has enough space for few more bikes. The caltrain stations have different facilities for parking bikes. In general you can easily carry around your bike in SF and lock it to one of the many on street bike lock stands.

In conclusion, SF's public transport is about as good at other cities I have been too, of course nothing beats a proper metro transport like that in Hong Kong, Paris, London and New Delhi*, but MUNI is SF can get you from one point to other and quite time efficiently.

* Didn't get a chance to explore New Delhi metro much but it looked great though it still doesn't have full coverage.

The big move experience :)

This comes pretty late but I guess, I can still do justice to the events ...

As many people mentioned I didn't give enough advance notice about my moving to Mountain View, California. Well it was so because of my ever changing plans and some dependency on the receiving of Visa. I was earlier planning to leave by September beginning for a month long vacation and then heading right away to work. Lately decided to not take that long vacation but instead just have a 10 days stopover. So everything got decided at very close timelines and the departure seemed quite sudden.

About the move part, well moving to a different country could be quite challenging, even if you don't have too much to carry with yourself. Here is what ended up being on my todo list, I searched for these on net and didn't find a good resource.

1) Closing Service connections
- Telephone (I had none)
- Mobile (usually straight forward, just pay the bill online and give them a call to close the account)
- Broadband (again, I didn't have to do it, but this one may take time)
Approx 2-3 days

2) Selling your stuff
Stuff which you don't want to keep or gift away. (taking photograhs and sending email to right groups help, some cities you can use craigslit service for this).

3) Moving stuff you can't sell to your parents'/relatives' place
I could really send almost all my stuff to my relative and didn't have to sell anything. This made it simple. I sent a bunch of stuff from Hyd to Pune for about 8 K, which included bike, TV, computer, computer table, cot and materess. Moving stuff domestically typically could take 3-4 days.

4) Bike/Car NOC.
This one is interesting. You need to get a NOC from the RTA in your city/state to be able to transfer vehicle to other state. With a NOC someone can drive it for 1 year without paying the road taxes again.
If you want to change the number to get a local state number, that could be done too, it would need a NOC too (AFAIK). This took me about 10-15 days in Hyderabad though it should be done quicker usually.

5) Address change/update notifications to concerned departments/services.
Best idea is to switch to electronic statements quite some time in advance.

6) Start informing your friends and relatives, can take quite some time to bid byes to people :)

7) Carry proper adaptor for devices you are carrying with yourself.


Thats about it. I think I am forgetting some stuff, will add things later.

San Diego trip

The blog post comes 6 weeks after the trip but its been one great trip that I must write about.

San Diego(SD) is around 8 hrs away from Mountain View, CA. I didn't find enough interest amount friends to drive all the way, but for me SD was one places waiting to be visiting since long. My previous attempt last year failed as friends decided to spend both days of weekend at Los Angeles instead of driving further to SD. In terms of drivers I was the only one luckily we figured out that Vatsa was in Santa Monica and was willing to drive to and fro SD from there and so we started.

From San Diego trip

From San Diego trip

After getting some expert advice about saving driving time and trouble with traffic we decided to leave just after dinner on Friday, which with some delay ended up being 10:30 PM. Luckily we got a GPS for the trip. Santa Monica our first destination was 5 hrs and 30 minutes away. With some irresistible stops at rest areas because of drowiness we finally reached SM by 4:30 AM. SM to SD is just a 2hrs and 30 minutes distance and we left from SM by 9:00 to reach the Sea World by around 11:30 AM.

From San Diego trip

Sea world at San Diego is amoung the most famour theme parks. Mostly because of the Dolphin shows there. Shamu is the name of the most famous Dolphon there and probably in the world too. There were around 7 shows on the schedule most of them repeat every one hour. The rides are pretty much continuous but close by 7:00 PM. We were able to catch almost all the shows. The dolphin show was the major attraction and was amoung the best performances I have seen and of course the Dolphin performed the most of it but their trainers were also a major part of the wonderful show. Other great things to see include Sea World aquarium, the 4 D show. We also had a couple of rides. There is a kinda conclusive show at 7:00 PM which is called "Shamu takes you around the world or something" which is a beautiful light and sound show along with the Dolphin stunts :)

From San Diego trip

From San Diego trip

From San Diego trip

From San Diego trip

The plan to walk around the downtown in the evening didn't work as it was raining quite heavily and findind parking in SD turned out to be as hard as it is in San Francisco. We went to a restaurant Maxican near North SD. The complimentory nachos were mouth watering tasty and so was the Quesidilla, but the most interesting thing was the "Grande Margarita" drink which they say was originated here and became famous all over the world.

The next day we head a couple of things to do. The SD zoo, the beaches (surfing) and the La Jolla. It turned out the rain has turned off the option for surfing. We decided to go the zoo and I it was pretty mch worth spending the 4-5 hrs there. Among the rare animals to see there are Kangaroes, Kwalas, Hippos, Penguins and Bears. The place also hosts variety of birds and other typicall animals like buffaloes, zebras, jiraffes, tigers and so on. What I found different in this zoo was that most animal weren't kept in completely closed cabins, instead they were kept in mostly open ones. I remember reading somewhere in the zoo that they keep the animal in completely close cabins only for sometime in the begining till they get used to the new environment, interesting!

From San Diego trip

After this we went to see La Jolla, which is a very scenic place famous for the sunset view. The beach at La Jolla indeed gives a very beautiful view at sunset. The waves at SD were also pretty big compared to those I have seen around Santa Cruz, It was clear that SD happens to be a big surfing spot.

From San Diego trip

The return jouney was also done in the same split manner and it turned out pretty well in the end but for the last 60 miles where it became almost impossible to drive and we had to pull over almost 3 times. It all turned was all good. A big long 1100 miles on a 2 day fun filled weekend.

Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park

We had a trip to Kings Canyon and Sequoia national park during weekend of 26 April. What a trip. I had a vague idea of what the Sequoias would be like having seen the Muir woods forest near San Francisco but the sequoias in these national park are much taller compared to the Redwoods in the muir woods. Here are some numbers:

1) Largest tree in the world (by Volume): The General Sherman: 275 ft, ...
2) One of the widest tree in the world : The Grant Sequoia 40 ft wide


















Besides the talls trees which are seen in both forest, there is also a high probability of spotting some wild life, yes we did see it. We spotted two baby bears, a wood pecker, some wild cats, a wild lizard and also some other birds I don't know the names of.







The oneway journey is approx 5 hrs and you have to drive quite a bit inside the parks so though the earlier plan was to get back the same day by afternoon I was pretty sure I can't drive back all the way, as we kept seeing various points and did some trails we also figured out that the sequoia park itself takes one full day to have a good tour and then the kings canyon would need another full day, we cud only complete the tour by Sunday evening 7 PM (instead of earlier plan of leaving for Mountain View by Saturday 9 PM or so :P). Lodging was at the Snowline lodge on the way to Fresno, If you are prepared with camping equipments however you may easily find other places to stay for e.g YMCA or some camps in either of the parks.


Lots of beautiful spots and nice trails, waterfalls, lakes and awesome views of mountain ranges besides the big tall trees which were there at all places, is the best way to describe the place. I hope the photos speak themselves.