San Francisco

I have spent a few great days in San Francisco over the years.  It is a great conference city, it has nice large hotels, wonderful food, a large airport and good public transit.  I can honestly say, I have never had a bad day in San Francisco.  The first time I went there I had been in Sacramento for work and rented  car and drove over and spent one night.  Driving in San Francisco it a bit like driving in any crowded city, you get to see things, but you spend a lot of time stuck in traffic and hunting for parking.  As I recall parking the car overnight, cost almost as much as the hotel room.

My second trip to San Francisco, almost didn't happen.  I had been scheduled for a couple of days work in Napa, and just a few days before the start date, the program cancelled.  I had added a few days in San Francisco onto the business trip and had pre-paid non-refundable hotel reservations.  I thought about it for a minute, and cashed in frequent flyer miles and went anyway.  It was a great visit, with lots of wonderful exploring in the city.

Then even more excitement on the way home. I was flying from SFO to Atlanta, for the first time ever I had paid to watch the movie, someplace over Texas, suddenly the movie stopped, the cabin lights went out and things went silent in the airplane cabin.  Less then a minute later the flight crew came on over the intercom to tell us that the cabin lights had gone out, and we would be landing in Dallas.  We went from 38,000 feet to on the ground in Dallas in less then 10 minutes.  The electrical system on the plane had failed, one of the generators had failed, and the surge had caused the other two generators to fail, we landed on battery power.  When we came to a stop at the gate, there was smoke coming out of the engine cowling on the right hand side.  How exciting!  The airline re-booked us, I made it as far as Atlanta that night, spent the night in a very nice hotel and flew on home the next morning.