Vancouver and a rare Ted Loo siting!

Day 139: Vancouver, BC. This city turned out to be a pretty impressive place! I guess it reminds me a little bit of San Francisco...lots of natural beauty and plenty to do. I stayed the weekend at Mark Thielen's place, who unfortunately had to leave town before I arrived. This is the spectacular view out his window:

Through an amazing coincidence, Ted Loo just happened to email me about a month before I headed up to Canada. Ted animated with me on the Jimmy Neutron movie, but we lost contact over the years since. Now he's running his own personal training fitness company in Vancouver. You can check out his site at tedloofitness.com. Needless to say, the Jack and Crowns were flowing pretty heavy that weekend! :) Here's a pic with Ted and his girlfriend Rana. These two are super cool and was fun to hang out with them. Now we just gotta get Moses to take a trip up there!

On my final afternoon in town Thielen got back into town. Even though he just had an exhausting flight from Chicago, he still had the energy to show me a little bit of the city. He showed me around Rainmaker, the studio he now works at. I totally dug the studio...especially their break room which has been built as a full-functioning irish pub:

Here's a pretty shoddy panoramic shot a pasted together from pics taken on the roof of Rainmaker. If you click on the image it will give you a bigger image that you can actually see:

That really rainy city!

Day 137: Seattle, WA. Just three hours north of Portland is the city of Seattle. I was surprised to see how large the city was...I really didn't know much about it except for the Space Needle before going. I didn't get to see too much of the city since I was only there two days and it was cold and rainy most of the time. However I did get to see Matthew Russell's daughter sing at her school's celebration for Veteran's Day. You guys sounded awesome Grace!

After having lunch with Matthew and Burke down the street from where they work, I heard later on the news that a huge construction crane fell down a few streets over, killing someone in their apartment. You can check out that destruction at Andrew Burke's website.

So here's an obligatory photo of the Space Needle:

And one of the Science Fiction Museum/Experience Music Project next to the Space Needle...or as Menz described, "the ugliest building in the world":

The Pacific Northwest!

Day 132: Portland, OR. After hanging out in the Bay Area for abouta month, I decided to go on the final leg of my road trip...up to the Pacific Northwest.

On the way to Portland I was able to get a couple of decent shots of Mt. Shasta before the clouds completely obscured the mountain.



Then in the town of Cottage Grove I went on a 25 mile loop that went thru or next to 5 or 6 really cool looking old covered bridges.



Portland is a very beautiful city...lots of hills, trees...and oh yeah...it rained almost the entire time I was there! Besides all of the natural scenery I was most impressed by Powell's Book Store. Billed as the largest book store in America, this place truely is amazing. I couldn't really take a good picture to show the size of the store since it's made up of several connecting rooms. So here's a picture with Brian F Menz to show scale:

The Glorious Bay Area!!!

Day 111: San Francisco, CA. Wow...I've really be slacking lately on updating this site! I guess it's time to catch up where I've been lately.

In late October Wendy flew out from Dallas for her first visit to California. We went to Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Francisco, and Napa in the short time she was here.




On one of the nights a few of us crashed a dinner that Alex Fleisig was having with his mom and grandma. I don't think he noticed though...it looks like he's staring at the glow of a TV or something. And no that's not an android in the back with glowing red eyes...that's just Patrik Puhala's normal look on the weekends!