nathan jara

I’m in San Francisco, California! Can’t believe it. My first time on the west coast.We left work at 430 yesterday to get out to Pittsburgh International. Traffic on the parkway was thrilling. Luckily we got through it somewhat  painlessly. We arrived at the airport at 6PM for our flight to leave just after 7PM. Going through security was just has fun as I remember almost two years ago when I flew to Europe. Take off your belt, watch, shoes, cell phone, laptop and put everthing in the bins as fast as you can. Walk through the scanner then take everything out of the bins and dress yourself again while not holding up the line as 30,000 people are coming throught the line behind you. Anyway we got through painlessly and I found a Subway and scarfed down a spicy italian on wheat. Our flight left right on time and we were on our way to sunny California! (“sunny California” is best pronounced with an Arnold Schwarzeneggar accent.)

The flight was pretty smooth. One funny thing that happened was when my friend was using his laptop with the pull down table in front of him. The three ladies in the seats in front of us were playing Yahtzee and every time the one shook up her dice, it shook the table and and laptop. Pretty funny.

We arrived in Los Angeles about twenty minutes early. And our connecting flight to San Jose was about 15 minutes late so we arrived in San Jose right at midnight last night. We picked up our rental car, a Nissan Altima hybrid, and drove about 20 minutes to our Hampton Inn hotel in Mountain View. A quick check-in and shower and I was out. :)

This morning we grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel and hopped on Route 101 towards San Francisco. Traffic wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, especially since we were travelling during rush hour. What a beautiful state. I saw some palm trees on the way, some what I now call San Franciscan houses, and rolling California hills.

We got into downtown San Francisco a little before 8AM, parked the car, and are now set up and waiting for our jQuery training day to begin! Everyone has laptops open and we are raring to go. I’m excited to see what I’ll learn. And excited to see San Francisco tonight :)