Category: Travel

Our last stop yesterday was to Solvang, CA which I’ll let Wikipedia explain: “Solvang was founded in 1911 on 11,000 acres (4,500 ha) of the Rancho San Carlos de Jonata Mexican land grant, by a group of Danish educators, who traveled west to escape midwestern winters. The city is home to some bakeries, restaurants, and merchants offering a taste of Denmark in California. The architecture of many of the buildings follows traditional Danish style. There is a copy of the famous Little Mermaid statue from Copenhagen, as well as one featuring the bust of famed Danish fable writer Hans Christian Andersen. A replica of the Copenhagen observatory Rundetårn in the scale 1:3 was finished in 1991 and can be seen in the city centre.”

Jeremy Feeding Ostrichs from Jeremy Person on Vimeo.

OstrichLand was probably my second favorite stop yesterday, mostly because I love animals so it was fun getting so close to the ostriches.  They are som big, powerful and dare I say even ugly creatures!

Here are some interesting facts I learned from my visit:

• Adult ostriches stand 8′ to 9′ tall and weight 250 to 350 pounds
• Ostriches mature at 2 to 3 years, and breed until 40 years
• An ostrich can reach speeds of 45 MPH
• The oldest ostrich on record is 81 years old
• The ostrich is the only bird with two toes
• An ostrich egg weighs 3 to 4 pounds, the equivalent of 24 chicken eggs.  Ostrich eggs hatch in 42 days
• A good hen lays 40 to 60 eggs a season.  One layed 120 eggs!  Ostrich farming started in Southern Africa in 1857
• Ostriches are vegetarians and eat 3.5 pounds of food a day
• Each ostrich produces 1.5 pounds of feathers per season
• Ostrich hens incubate the eggs during the day, the rooster sits on the eggs at night
• An ostrich chick grows one foot taller each month
• The ostrich is native to Africa
• Ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand.

Christina and I hit the road over the last few days to visit her grandparents in Southern CA.  We left on Saturday morning a few minutes after 5am and traded off sleeping and driving.  I didn’t get to bed until 11pm Friday night because I was up cleaning the house from a long week.  I’m always glad I cleaned the house prior to traveling because there is nothing more stressful than coming home tired from a trip than returning to a disorganized home.  Not to mention I had someone checking in on Wilbur so I wanted to give the impression I have my life half together.  I made a big pot of coffee which Christina and I took with us on the road.  About 30 minutes down I-5 I was a talking fool, the caffeine hit me and I don’t remember what the conversation consisted of but it was tired caffeinated banter from me I’m sure.  I loaded up my iPhone with a bunch of podcasts which came in handy after the caffeine and my bantering slowed down.   I’ll post the interesting podcasts later with some comments, but I was happily playing talk show DJ for a few hours.  At some point she fell asleep which gave me a chance to listen to Pandora for a while.

I think our first stop was a gas station and then McDonalds for a gourmet breakfast of Egg McMuffins.  The McDonalds we stoppped at was really busy for some reason and in 20 minutes or less we were back on the road.  If my groggy memory serves me right Christina took over driving and I took a nap for an hour.  I can usually get by on very little sleep but anything under 6 hours and I’m a zombie.  I woke up when Christina was going over the grapevine and we listened to more podcasts until we hit LA.  We talked with Christina’s sister, brother in law and saw played with their baby for a few minutes before getting in their car to drive another two and a half hours to Palm Desert which is outside of Palm Springs.  Holy moly Palm Desert is hot and dry but I guess that is why the word desert is in its name.

We got back to the LA area around 9pm so Christina and I went to a nice mexican restaurant.  Somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 I found my hotel which is a few feet from where trains go through town.  Luckily only one train went by which was before I went to sleep.  We had planned on going down to San Diego Sunday morning to see friends but I think we were overly optomistic and decided it would be too much in one day.  Therefore we decided to head back to the Bay Area and hit as many destinations headed north as we could.  The first stop we made was completely unplanned which was the Ronald Regan National Library (they need a new web designer).  Of all places we visited yesterday I think the Regan Library was my favorite.  The above pictures and video are from our visit.

CMMA had their Spring 2010 President’s Dinner at Eddie Dean’s in downtown Dallas which was very fun.  They had calf roping (it was a mechanical one), armadillo racing, and bull riding.  I didn’t think I’d get on the bull until Dan persisted but I have to admit it was pretty fun.  I was thinking “you know, you only live once” which helped me sign the waver and my life away.  As you can see from the bull riding video I am quite the “urban cowboy”.

JCPenney’s headquarters is amazing!  Here are some pictures and a fun video of the JCPenney headquarters. The building is 1,930,000 sq. ft and is home to 4,000 employees and sits on 429 acres.  Don’t miss the robotic mail carts video down in their basement. Those robots are awesome and I must have one!

This morning we had our CMMA Board Meeting which was the work part but the fun part was taking a private tour of the Dallas Cowboys stadium this afternoon!  The stadium is amazing and the stadium screen is even more amazing.  I certainly didn’t expect to get to do this on the tour but we pretty much got to see every part of the stadium including the locker room and even go on the field itself and throw footballs around (forget that I took lots and lots and lots of pictures)!  I took some HD video on the field but the hotel connection is so slow I’ve given up on that for now until I get back home to the Bay Area.  Tomorrow we are off to visit the JCPenney headquarters down the street which means work but this conference is focusing on social media so it should be especially interesting for me.  More to come on that tomorrow.

I’m staying at the Dallas-Frisco Embassy Suites for the CMMA Spring Conference and am very thankful for a room that has a balcony view of the Dr. Pepper ballpark.  I love having a hotel room balcony because it lets me sit outside and get away from the stale air of a hotel room and relax which for me means blogging and watching the sun go down.  Every CMMA event they have something called “Bijou Theater” where each company is asked to show a video they are most proud of producing.  Keep in mind the videos are “corporate videos” so you see a wide range of creativity.  I like seeing the videos because it gives you a pretty good feel of each company’s corporate culture.  On Monday night we are actually going to be use the ballpark’s big screen to show the videos which should be very fun.

As you can see it is 2:09am Pacific, 4:09am Mountain and my circadian rhythm is already off a little bit.  The trip down to Dallas was fairly uneventful.  From Oakland our flight stopped in Phoenix and for whatever reason I seem to do most of my layovers at that airport.  The great news is on the flight to Phoenix I didn’t have anyone in the seat beside me and on the leg from Phoenix to Dallas a nice lady in Oakland “hooked me up” with an exit row seat which also didn’t have anyone beside me.  The thing I love about not having anyone beside me on a flight is I can actually break out my laptop and work without keeping my giant arms, hands, and laptop close to my chest.  Seriously if you have ever seen me try to type on a flight with someone sitting beside me, it looks like a velociraptor trying to type.

Driving in the Dallas area is nice because the roads are actually well laid out and just like everything else in Texas, the highways are big and you can tell they put some thought behind their infrastructure.  I know I say this every time I go to Texas but everything is BIG in Texas.  I don’t know why everything is BIG but the stores are BIG, the restaurants are BIG, the houses are BIG, the hotels are BIG, everything is BIG.  I went to Chipotle to get a steak burrito for dinner and if you haven’t tried Chipotle or their steak burrito, definitely do so.  Chipotle is my style because it is cheap, healthy, and quick.

The other thing I’ll mention about Texas, and something I say every time I am in Texas, is the people here are some of the nicest you’ll ever meet.  I’ve lived on the East Coast, West Coast, have relatives in the Mid West, and can honestly say Texas in my opinion has the nicest people of all places I visit or have lived.  You can also tell religion and Christianity is very BIG down here and it shows.  It just seems like a nice place to raise a family.  Things are a lot slower and maybe I am reading too much into it but people seem to have good values here.

Any way, after Chipotle I went to Best Buy to look around, what else would expect a geek like me to do?  Then I went to a half price book store which would be awesome to have back in the Bay Area but I didn’t buy anything.  Next door to that they had this BIG kids entertainment store with a train that picks up the kids in the parking lot…kind of like a Texas sized Chuck E. Cheese.  Then I went to a “Super Target” because I had never been in one and I’m a grocery/retail geek, so I had to see it.  The Super Target surprised me, not because they had groceries, I knew that would be the case, but because going there made me stop and think that the company I work for and Target are actually viable competitors for the first time.  Long story short, the Super Target was very nice, very clean as all Targets tend to be, but I like a more market feel to my grocery store.

I think that is all for now.  I have a Board Meeting in the morning here in a little bit (going back to bed) and then this afternoon we are heading to Dallas Cowboys Stadium for a tour which should be interesting so more on that shortly.

Christina, Tyler, and I went to the Oakland Zoo this morning.  The weather was fantastic and we had a great time.