Right time, right place, right sport?

Posted on January 6th, 2009 by axel.
Categories: Axel in SF.

Looks like I’m at the right time at the right place with the right sport… I just need the right idea…
Silicon Valley quest: Wind over water
and yeah, wind… stupid winter, it’s hardly any wind all day… but spring and summertime is supposed to be better.

And this is the spot where all the rich and famous go out for a session:

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Happy New Year btw, I think I missed it in the last post…

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On the Road to a New Year

Posted on January 5th, 2009 by axel.
Categories: Axel in SF.

As is generally known one picture tells more stories than 1000 words, so I rather keep myself short and try to fill the lines in between those picturesque 1000 words…

For Xmas, Julius, a fellow student from Hamburg, came over on the 24th. He’s doing an internship in Vancouver and consequently pushed me to find a flat so he can book his flight (thanks for being so relentless).
And then he came, escaped the snow madness in Canada just by luck (Air Canada cancelled all flights at the 24th) and was just in time to get the best parts of Willie II, who died with his 10kg’s for our Xmas pleasure. Well, and a lot of grape-vines also gave their fruits for even more pleasure…

Ok, let’s now get to the interactive part. Julius did not come here to stay at my flat all day long, so we got a rental car and hit the road after a short San Francisco experience.
The map shows our route, initially we planned to make our way back through the Sierra Nevada mountain range, but heavy snowfall kept us from driving in regions of 2500m…


Größere Kartenansicht

As you can see, our goals were the highway 1 down the coast. Big Sur is one of the most impressive coastal roads I have ever seen, it can even compete easily with the awesome roads of New Zealand.


We made our way down to Los Angeles where we stayed the first night in a hostel in Hollywood, the other night we spent at a friend of Julius’ sister, a film producer who owns an awesome place with ocean view in Santa Monica.

On the 31st we left LA early in the morning to party into the New Year in Vegas, baby! We arrived in the afternoon, but still had no place to pass out in the morning. We were so close to paying an overpriced motel, when finally our ‘couchsurfing’ host Shana called us at last and we stayed for free at her carpet coz her couch was occupied with other couchsurfers.
Big THANKS to Shana for that accomodation!
Hell yeah, so nothing more which could stop us from partying in Vegas anymore. We started and ended our night at Vegas downtown, which is the old part without those mega resorts. The middle of the night we spent on the ‘Strip’, the part of the LV boulevard where all those fancy big casinos are (like Bellagio, New York New York, Venetian and Paris LV).
It was a really awesome party on the whole road, STOMPers on the street and many people dancing, two Red Bull events (motocross jumping up and down the fake 30m Arc de Triumph and a guy backflipping his car some 10m high up in the air). Unfortunately we just saw the fake jump of a motocrosser ‘above’ the Volcano of the Mirage. Instead he jumped on the street and with the camera angle it might look like he actually jumped above it… But was still fun to look at, as you might imagine from the videos:

For the actual New Year we expected some great fireworks and fountain shows in front of the Bellagio but surprisingly nothing happened… I missed the usual fountain show at quarter to 12 while waiting at the toilet in the belief that an even greater show will be held at 12. Even the fire and police men were discussing about what happened to the firework… Speculations were that it is due to the financial crisis…
Not caring about it myself, I threw 20$ at the end of the night on a BlackJack table… While I tried to multiply my money, the guy next to me lost more and more money on the table, which summed up to in total 160$ during the time were I finally lost my 20$.

Our first day of the year led us to and through the Death Valley, which felt like totally another planet…

A different view on the same story can be found in German on Julius blog.

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