The sign says: Grande Coffee Frappuccino: $3.99, Lemon Poppyseed Muffin: $2.29. But the truth is: All that you see here can be yours for $3.83. At the airport, no less. True story.

TSA regulations forbid bringing liquids or gels in containers larger than 3 oz through the security checkpoint. “Either drink them and get your money’s worth or throw them out.” The airport in-terminal bottled beverage industry is overjoyed.

Pretty sweet day today: after staying up til 12:30 last night working ahead on my work project and not falling asleep after that due to an americano, I went in to work at 7:15. That was early. :-(. BUT, I got to leave at 1:15 and head out to go touristing with Jeni. We drove to Milbrae Station, where we parked the Jeep for free and caught the Caltrain to San Francisco. We toured Golden Gate Park (No view of the bridge, incidentally), the crazy downtown hills, and walked through part of Chinatown. Pretty sweet. Also, we got to see them setting up for the Apple WWDC next week. That was also pretty sweet. Next up: SFO to fly back to Green Bay tonight for Tracy’s wedding. Jeni doubts my ability to cope with a 3-hr night… and I have to say, it’s going to be interesting. Anyway, keep an eye on my LiveTrip and watch how fast I make the return trip to Green Bay! Attached, a picture of the trolleys in San Francisco.

Well, we’re getting nearer to our destination! We’ve just crossed most of the Mojave Desert en route to Santa Clara. Interesting sight along Hwy 58: Enormous wind farm covering a whole ridgeline. Pretty cool! Other than that, though, not much of anything but dirt and cacti…

Vegas is Big. I made it through alive. Too tired to write more: it’s 2:30 here, 4:30 on my body’s Central Time. G’nite.

An update from Utah- There’s not much here except for barren landscapes and I-70. Quite beautiful though, in an exotic other-worldly sort of way. Just a little unnerving to see a road sign: “No services on I-70 next 100 miles”… Anyway, Utah is pretty cool to drive through, AND to make it even better yet, I finished my LiveTrip program last night, so you can follow our progress live by clicking on the link at the top of this page! Try it out, and let me know what you think. The only problem I didnt anticipate was: there are no fricking cities in Utah to ask Google to put on the map! So I guess hang on a bit until we reach mappable civilization. 🙂 Until then! (Or actually until we reach cellphone coverage again… 😉 )

Road Trip to CA: Day 3
After a marathon 12ish hour drive across all of Nebraska and Colorado yesterday, we stayed the night about 20 miles from Utah in Grand Junction, CO. Along the way, we passed through Denver and the Rocky Mountains, which were pretty awesome! The only snag was some road construction on the west side of the mountains, which cost us like 40 minutes of stop-and-go traffic that also made my left leg tired from clutching 🙂 After that we had quite the adventure finding food in Rifle, CO. We ended up at a crazy local Mexican restaurant that actually had pretty good food. This picture is the beautiful canyon we were stuck in during the road construction. See all the stopped cars ahead?

End of Day 1: Jeni and I made it to Lincoln, Nebraska around 7:30 pm. Had supper at Culvers and then checked out the Capitol in downtown Lincoln. It was really interesting architecturally, it felt kindof like a temple or something. Then at night I started working on a new WordPress gadget that I’ve called LiveTrip. You can see an early prototype at the link at the top of this page. The goal is to extend the Postie plugin that I use to send blog posts, like this one, from my phone. I want to add geotagging abilities to it, so that when I post a blog entry, if I include the name of the city in the post, a pushpin will be automatically added to the Google map. The second idea is to also allow me to send just a pushpin, so that I can build a “live” map of our progress during this roadtrip. Should be cool when it works. As of today, all you get is a pushpin of my house, but now that I got the map showing a GeoRSS feed, I should be able to make it dynamic soon.
Stay tuned!

Crossing the Mighty Mississippi, and I’m gone for the summer! I suppose it’s somehow fitting that we leave in a rainstorm, a nice last impression of home before heading to the great (hopefully) sunny state of California.