Accent français

Last Friday I came back from a 10 day road trip driving from San Francisco to Seattle, and coming back with the Amtrak Coast Starlight train – as I mentioned earlier.

I used Foursquare a bit more than usual (about 50 checkings over 10 days) and took a lot of pictures of rocks, landscapes, forests, the ocean, etc.
I started making a simple mashups to visualize the overall itinerary I ended up doing.

View full screen (Pink bubbles have photos. Blue bubbles are the checkins on the way to Seattle. Yellow bubbles are the checkins on the way back to San Francisco.)

I have photos on Flickr.

Some highlights:

• 1990 miles / 3200 km driven from SF to Seattle in 8 days.
• Very nice weather except the day I drived through Crater Lake, which I could not see at all because of the fog.
• Not many tourists or anyone on the roads end of October.
• I loved all the coastal areas, and especially the Olympic National Park.
• I ended up staying in campgrounds most of the nights, in the middle of a forest or close to the ocean, with barely anyone around. That was awesome.
• It’s not easy to find the cheap / non-RV campgrounds where you can put a tent or just sleep in the car.
• All the roads were surprisingly well maintained (I’m too used to the bad roads of south SF).
• I really liked the cities of Bend and Portland in Oregon. Seattle, WA… not as much but that was at the end of my trip. Redding, CA was weird.
• I think I expected a bit more from the train trip (23 hours from Seattle to San Francisco). That was really comfortable but as I was into a good book, and we were going through areas I had driven across, I did not pay much attention to the landscape.

I put the code for the mashup on github.

Enfin de retour sur Helsinki pour 10 jours. Ca faisait un an que j’en était partie, et ca me fait vraiment chaud au coeur de retrouver le calme olympien de la Finlande. Et en plus, il fait beau, le ciel est bleu et c’est Hullut Paivat (les jours fous de la semaine de soldes) à Stockmann.

Arrivée Lundi dernier, j’ai passé la journée avec Vidya au showcase interne des technologies développées dans notre petit empire. Eloignés du centre du monde à Palo Alto, c’est difficile de rester visibles, et connectés. J’en profite pour voir les amis qui sont toujours en Finlande. C’est pratique, la plupart des amis personnels sont aussi des collègues à qui je peux montrer nos projets, discuter. Le tout en un. Les amis et le boulot. Parfait.
Le seul regret est qu’AC et DJ sont en vadrouille en Grèce et que je ne les verrai que 3 nuits et 2 jours.

Je serai de retour Mercredi prochain à Palo Alto, à temps pour des meetings d’un projet du type grignoteur vorace de temps, et je serai à UIST organisé à Monterey, Ca.