San Francisco / San Jose 2006 travelogue, part 2

I’m writing this in United Red Carpet lounge that doesn’t live up to my expectations of airport lounges. There are no sofas or comfortable chairs, no free booze and generally no nice atmosphere. My memories of the lounge from 2002 were much more positive, maybe they have remodelled this place or my memory is beatifying things.

I’m also too cheap to get an overpriced T-Mobile WLAN access for an hour, so this will be posted later.

Monday and Tuesday was spent with all kinds of business activities, so not too much to say about those days.

On Wednesday the trip continued to San Jose. I had reserved a car from avis.com and surprisingly enough I got exactly the car I had ordered with the same price. As there were some extra time on the day, we spent the morning in Muir Woods — an excellent nature reserve to see some old redwoods.

In the afternoon we drove to Gilroy to visit the 145 outlets in Chelsea Premium Outlets village. We didn’t step into every single of those, but anyhow a formidable number and spent surprisingly little for the amount of stuff that we bought.

The outlets were boasting huge discounts for the black Friday, but fortunately we visited them already on Wednesday; there were no huge crowds and most of the discounts were already in place. After shopping, we arrived to San Jose just before darkness fell, and I had an evening meeting.

Thursday was Thanksgiving and most of the places were shut. We went to Santa Cruz to see the northern Californian beach life and hang out in the sun. The day was sunny, but surprisingly cold. We were woken early due to still continuing jetlag, and the beachfront was mostly closed when we arrived. Fortunately the sealions don’t follow any schedules and the lower level of the pier was full of them honking merrily.

Some of my Finnish aqcuitances don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, so I could have a meeting also on Thursday after returning from Santa Cruz.

Friday after Thanksgiving is called black Friday, as it is the biggest retail sales event of the year and it is believed that the shops turn into profit (from red to black) on that specific day. At least the stores were packed — Express Men had two hours queue to the tills, and GAP was swarming people. We had purchased a lot on Wednesday, so we shopped only a few clothes and toys for Aapo. I visited also Fry’s to get some business stuff with extra cheap prices.

Our flight is on Saturday evening, as selecting this day saved a lot of money — in fact so much that being a couple more days was justifiable. This time we got bassinet seats, but decided to exchange them to a full row for us three. Time will tell whether the seats are still available for us when we board the plane.

The story continues onboard Lufthansa plane

Connexion by Boeing is being shut down, so I’m enjoying a free WLAN access enroute. We got a row of our own, so Aapo has been able to sleep most of the trip in seats between me and Sanna.

There is approximately three hours of flight time left, then one hour for the transfer and then yet three hours to Helsinki. Hopefully this flight is not late, so we wouldn’t need to stay in Munich for the next night.