Madonna Inn Bathroom

Apparently the world's best bathroom - and we've seen it (Becky too) - that is a waterfall/urinal - rather unique :-)

Barstow, California

We have made it to the Klingenberg residence here in Barstow, California driving all the way from Watsonville - near Santa Cruz. We stopped to visit the iFixit guys, and see how they run their ecommerce company. Then we headed all the way across the 58 to Barstow, through San Luis Obispo, Kern and San Bernadino counties. That is one windy road - I thought it was fun but Becky was feeling a bit woozy.

We made it to Bernie and Renee's about 7 last night and we've been relaxing there since. We are going to see Amanda's boyfriend Darren race tonite in the Legend series - otherwise we are mostly taking it easy. I think we might check a few Route 66 and Railroad things out maybe :-)

If you want to see a few of the places we've been check out our map.

Gallery of Photos

We finally got a good wifi connection so I was able to upload some photos. You can see a few of the things we've done the last few days :-) Click on the picture and follow through the photos (no we didn't go to Disneyland again, that was last year - I accidentally put them all in the same location and I'm too lazy to fix it - heck I'm on vacation!)

Good thing I don't use Twitter...

Or it'd be a whole lot of Eric is driving here, Eric is driving there, Eric is driving nowhere. There are a lot of roads in the Bay Area and I feel as though I've driven on at least half of them :-) I'm getting much better at knowing where we are, and Becky and I can read the maps without feeling totally lost. We haven't even hooked up the GPS yet.

It's nice here, there is no snow, no rain, the grass is green there are big beautiful leaves on the trees. It feels like summer a good two months early. It's not super warm yet, I guess it's still spring and here in Northern California (locals do not consider this Southern California, big difference) it's about 20 degrees or so on average. But it doesn't get as cold as night which is nice, especially as we spent last night at a campsite near the Pacific ocean in Half Moon Bay. Really nice, but I was worried it'd be really cold. The only real problem we had was the tent was on an angle, and therefore we had to keep rolling ourselves back uphill.

We have one more day with Dave and Cheryl and the kids and then we are heading down towards Barstow to visit with the Klingenberg family. We may stop in San Luis Obispa (sp??) to visit with some new friends we made at the Maker Faire. If you need your Ipod or Macbook fixed, these are the guys to call. The cool thing is that they are about our age, and doing quite well. That and SLO is a nice place to visit, lots of vineyards and all that. We will be stopping in Monterey on the way down as well to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which we've been looking forward too. It's been a bit of a whirlwind trip, and we could use a few more days to sleep and a week to really explore - but we are super happy to be here. But I should go, check to see if Dave and Cheryl have arrived, and enjoy a bit more of this California sun.

Hope everyone is well, and we really like hearing about our pets - we really miss them and our families, more this year than even last I think. Cheers!

Maker Faire 2008 Info

Some stuff from the Faire:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=maker+faire+2008&m=text
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=maker+faire+2008&search_type=
http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9935358-52.html?tag=nefd.blgs
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/walle-robot-toy.html
http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/maker_faire/index.html
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=maker+faire+2008&um=1&sa=X&oi=blogsearch_group&resnum=12&ct=title
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/05/maker_faire_time_lapse.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVaVRlmiQUs

Busy, Busy...

Well, it's been a crazy busy day or two, I'm not sure... I can't remember. The Maker Faire has been an incredible success the last two days and we were able to do quite well with our booth. It was also incredibly tiring, so we are both here, with one last night in our hotel extremely tired. I have lots of stuff to show off, and a few pictures to upload. I'll do that as soon as we can, but first some sleep as we need to get up early tomorrow for a trip to Alcatraz and downtown SF.

Wall-E

So, in case I didn't mention it to anyone who may be reading this, Disney is going to be at this years Faire. We saw the crates with Wall-E painted on the outside, so I am quite excited to see what they are going to do. I never figured that they would come to something like this, but really this is a gathering of some of the brightest and most creative minds around, and usually people who are really good at building stuff - which makes sense considering it appears that WDI is hiring.

Unfortunately not everything is great this year, we are stuck in a 10x10 booth, with chain link dividers on both sides of us. It's a real squeeze, a real tight squeeze. And not to mention that SparkFun is right across from us, they aren't exactly are arch nemesis, but they are competition. Instructables is kitty-korner to us as well which is cool, though I must say, our laser is bigger than theirs :-)

So we are squished in and it's going to be a lot of work to get people in and out but we can do it, we have the mousebot, which is very cool. The Faire definitely is bigger this year a bit better run, and bigger sponsers which is all very cool. That and we aren't working 10AM to 10PM as we expected, our area is going to close at 6PM which means that we can actually see stuff at night, including the Flaming Lotus Girls. I'll take pictures :-)

Oh, and I already got a free shirt and some stickers from Yahoo! And I had the strawberry crepes (Bacon and Eggs tomorrow!)