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An El Camino Stretch

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Like any good blogger I have a news catcher that sends me alerts when stories crop up about my topic of choice, “El Camino.” Most stories are about our California road, but sometimes other subjects find my inbox, like this: starting Monday, June 20 a stretch of El Camino Real is going to be closed by construction crews for four months in the Bay Area. That’s the Galveston Bay Area. In Houston, TX. Sucks for them.

Occasionally I catch stories about the famed Chevrolet El Camino car/truck hybrid, usually sourced from car news and gossip site Jalopnik.com, and they’re typically pretty entertaining. Jalopnik loves them some ‘Mino and it shows. This week they posted an ad for a modified El Camino for sale in Detroit on Craig’s List, and it leaves me speechless. The owner stretched the truck bed, added another rear axle, and made various other cosmetic “enhancements.” Wow. Quite possibly the ugliest vehicle I have ever seen. Plus, he got the Ackermann geometry all wrong. I mean, geez.

I’m being unnecessarily mean. It may not look like much but I acknowledge it’s quite a feat of automotive engineering and craftsmanship and the owner claims it runs great, so kudos for that.

Kudos also to Jalopnik for dropping some real El Camino science in their writeup:

El Camino Real, or the Royal Road, refers to the 600-mile long padre path spanning San Diego to San Francisco, and interconnecting the California Missions. The builder of today’s Chevy El Camino with seis ruedas was obviously on a mission – a mission to make this the most El Camino-ist El Camino in the whole PBR-drinkin’ world.

True that.

[Source: Jalopnik]

Posted in El Camino Real, Houston, meta, miscellaneous, news, transportation, web | No Comments »

Lost in Los Altos

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

Do you know what’s embarrassing? Getting lost on El Camino Real. I don’t mean “lost” in the poetic sense, as in getting so enraptured by the sights and wonders that I lose all sense of time. I mean “lost” as in not having a perfectly clear notion of either where I am, where my destination is, or the precise relationship between the two. “How could you possibly get lost on El Camino?” you protest. “It’s a street, a one-dimensional line!” This is true, but after 200 years the road has developed a few idiosyncrasies which can snare the unwitting traveler. One of them is the city of Los Altos.

Border Road

The first tricky thing about Los Altos is something that residents know but it took me a while to figure out: Los Altos does not cross El Camino Real. The city flows down from the hills but in its northernmost section it abuts El Camino. That means if you’re driving down El Camino, Los Altos exists only on one side of the street. El Camino borders Los Altos for about a mile and a half.

This is unusual. As far as I can determine, there’s only one other city in the Bay Area that touches but does not cross El Camino: Hillsborough, and that’s only for about two blocks.

Tri-City Area

Los Altos doesn’t exist in a vacuum. For that mile and a half stretch of El Camino, the other side of the street is either Palo Alto or Mountain View. There is a spot on El Camino between Del Medio and Los Altos avenues where Los Altos, Palo Alto, and Mountain View all meet in a single point. No wonder it’s easy to lose track of where you are! The border between Mountain View and Palo Alto is marked only by the fence, bush, and break in the low wall in this photograph. Really they are the property line between the Country Inn Motel (Palo Alto) and The Hotel Aria (Mountain View), which used to be a Holiday Inn. Cryptically there is a signpost right here pointing to Los Altos (Avenue, that is) which takes on new significance.

Numbers Game

Granted, maybe it doesn’t really matter to you what city you’re in unless you’re challenging the jurisdiction of the speeding ticket you just received from the other city’s Police Department. What really matters is the street address right? Well that’s where things get really crazy. Take a trip with me.

Say you’re on El Camino in Palo Alto, heading south. As you cross Arastradero Road you’re on the 4200 block of El Camino with even addresses on your right and odd addresses on your left. The addresses increase as you go. As we all know, one of the cornerstones of modern civilization is that even and odd addresses are on opposite sides of the street, and that street addresses are ordered monotonically. You pass the Crowne Plaza Cabaña Hotel at 4290 ECR which is the last Palo Alto address on that side. You cross Adobe Creek and your side of the street is now Los Altos, though the other side of El Camino is still Palo Alto. Still with me? Fear not because the addresses still make sense. Both sides are now the 4300 block; the Motel 6 Palo Alto on your left is 4301 and the Courtyard Los Altos on your right is 4320. (There are a lot of hotels here.) You roll on and cross Los Altos Avenue. You’re still in Los Altos on your side but as we said, soon the other side turns into Mountain View. Your side is the 4400 block but the other side, the Mountain View side, is suddenly 2700! What?! That’s right, the addresses take a quantum leap on that Palo Alto/Mountain View side of the street.

Remember that the border between Palo Alto and Mountain View lies between the Country Inn Motel and The Hotel Aria. They are neighbors, but here are their addresses:

4345 El Camino in Palo Alto, 2700 El Camino in Mountain View, literally next door to each other. Not only do the numbers jump, but the Palo Alto addresses are odd and the Mountain View addresses are now even. The Los Altos addresses on your side are also even. This is madness! But wait, there’s more. As you keep driving, your Los Altos addresses continue to increase, but your Mountain View addresses get smaller! They run in opposite directions. You get to the end of Los Altos and cross over into all-Mountain View a little past Rengstorff Ave. On your side the last Los Altos address is 5150 El Camino Real and their neighbor in Mountain View is 2065. Even addresses become odd. The 5100s become 2000s. Enough said.

This address nonsense used to trip me up from time to time. Back in the old days before online maps and GPS units, I would look up a business in the phone book (remember those?). Maybe I was going to El Torito at 4470 El Camino Real, Los Altos. (Don’t bother looking for it now; it’s gone.) If I made the mistake of approaching through Mountain View, the addresses around me would be no help at allsomewhere in the 2000s when I’m looking for 4470, and odd when I’m looking for even. This confusion is part of the reason I started AllCamino.com. I felt a need to understand these addresses and help my fellow sufferers. Don’t even get me started on West El Camino, East El Camino, South El Camino, and North El Camino.

Reading Signs

It’s not all bad. Even without wireless navigation technology there are plenty of hints to keep you oriented. There are well-placed “city limits” signs, and the light posts have handy civic banners hanging from them. Los Altos Patch Editor L.A. Chung pointed out a useful trick. Los Altos city street signs are brown and Mountain View signs are blue. I figured out on my own that Palo Alto signs are white, but the Palo Alto trash cans are blue.

I still get lost on El Camino every now and then which is especially humiliating since I have this blog and all. Technology helps but I can’t always rely on it, so I’m learning that a little knowledge and good ol’ powers of observation go a long way. And if those fail me there’s always the last option of a desperate man: stopping to ask for directions.

Posted in El Camino Real, Los Altos, memories, meta, Mountain View, Palo Alto, transportation | No Comments »

Patch a Match, Natch

Sunday, May 15th, 2011

I first heard of Patch.com from Ryan Sebastian of Treatbot. A few months back we were chatting at a South FIRST Fridays event and he told me Treatbot had been interviewed by Adelaide Chen of Milpitas Patch, and that Mayra Flores de Marcotte was preparing to launch a new Campbell Patch. I knew Mayra’s handmade Kerfufle jewelry and her husband Josh’s Lost San Jose photography from exhibits at The Usuals. Treatbot…South FIRST Fridays…The Usuals…these are all luminous bodies in the AllCamino firmament, so let’s say Patch.com came to me well-recommended by these indirect El Camino connections.

I immediately checked it out and learned Patch.com is a slick, coordinated, AOL-owned network of hyperlocal news sites about communities across the country. Several are in California so I subscribed to all the Bay Area Patches for cities that lie on El Camino Real or have mission connections. I figured this would be an excellent way to catch news stories about the road. My current, growing list of Patches to follow is:

Back in November, as I was embarking on the the Shellmound Peace Walk through Milpitas, I contacted Adelaide in the spirit of networking and to my surprise got signed on as a freelance contributor. Since then she has given me the opportunity to write three articles for Patchmy first experience in journalism. It was a blast writing with a professional voice and (full disclosure) it was quite cool to be paid for those pieces.

Recently, however, she let me know that all Patches are adding a new feature: blogs. They are offering space for bloggers to write in their own voices about local topics they are passionate about. Patch bloggers don’t get paid, but they gain expanded exposure to a wider audience while retaining independence and ownership over the content. I knew right away this was a natural fit for me. Freedom!

I contacted the various Patch editors and so far the response has been quite positive. This is new for everyone so I’m still figuring out how it will work, but here’s the vision. AllCamino.com will continue to exist independently exactly as it does today; I’ll still do what I do. But if I write a post that might interest a particular Patch’s readers, I may cross-post to that Patch’s blog. Or I might write a standalone piece at Patch and just link to it here.

I’m taking baby steps now. I just published my first Patch blog at Los Altos Patch. The editor there, L.A. Chung, was the first to activate my Patch blog and she’s been very supportive and helpful so to her go the spoils. Click the link to read it:

An El Camino Real Journey

By Bill Moore | May 10, 2011
El Camino Real is an important part of California history and Bay Area life. AllCamino.com is a blog that celebrates the past, present and future of The Royal Road.

It’s a fairly generic piece. My intention is to use it as an introduction on every Patch. See, I can do that. Freedom!

Do you like my profile photo there? It took me many takes and half an hour to get it right. It’s a trick-shot self-portrait and all I had as a guide was the little mirror on the back of my cameraphone. It was a lot harder than I expected and I got some funny looks from drivers whizzing by on El Camino. Can you locate that bell?

I think this Patch relationship will be a lot of fun. The symbolism is irresistable. AllCamino is the virtual link among the various Patches, just as El Camino Real is the concrete link that joins the real cities. These Patches are stitched together by a common thread that together make up the fabric of Northern California. Um, too much? Sorry about that.

I love the breathless tone of press releasesthey’re invariably so thrilled!and I always wanted to write one, so here we go:

Today AllCamino.com is thrilled to announce a new partnership with Patch.com. Blogger Bill Moore says, “This is the dawn of a new era of Bay Area hyperlocal storytelling. AllCamino and Patch create unique synergy and an enhanced value proposition for our combined readership along the El Camino Real information superhighway.” Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post and recent addition to the AOL family, remarks, “We are thrilled to roll out one of the most exciting offshoots of our turbo-charged web presence. This week we launch a great new chapter for Patch.com.”

That’s a real quote from Arianna, by the way, just not about me specifically. A real journalist wouldn’t take a quote out of context like that, but hey I’m a blogger. Freedom!

Posted in Belmont, Burlingame, El Camino Real, First Street, Gilroy, Los Altos, Menlo Park, meta, Millbrae, Milpitas, Mountain View, news, Palo Alto, people, San Bruno, San Carlos, San Jose, San Mateo, San Rafael, Santa Cruz, South San Francisco, The Alameda, web | 1 Comment »

AllCamino Gift Guide

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

I had this great idea for a blog post: the AllCamino Gift Guide. This is the season for a lot of things, not the least of which is giving. I thought I’d make a little list of lovely El Camino gifts, either stuff related to or available on our favorite road. That’s when I hit a snag. Whom is this list for? If, like me, you have an abiding affection for The Royal Road, then of course you read this blog avidly and you’re reading this post at this very moment, which means the surprise will be ruined for you if you are lucky enough to receive anything on this list. All I can suggest is that you stop reading now, but we both know that’s not going to happen. On the other hand, if you’re shopping for the El Camino enthusiast in your life, then you’re probably married to me, and remember we agreed on a dollar amount limit this year, Dear.

Joking aside, these are some items off the top of my head that I think would make great gifts now or anytime. It’s limited in geographic scope because I do spend most of my time in Santa Clara County, so that’s what I know. Over time I hope to find treasures in other regions. I’ll let you know in next year’s list. These are presented in no particular order.

I ♥ SJ Gear

Get your tee shirts, sweatshirts, and hoodies at The Usuals on The Alameda in San Jose. This iconic design by Mike Millares of Deadstök is blowing up; don’t miss the excitement. Here’s a challenge: upload or email to The Usuals an unusual photo of yourself wearing your shirt. We’re trying to start a movement. (This picture of me doesn’t count as unusual; the movement hadn’t started yet when we took it.)

As it just so happens, The Usuals is hosting a party Friday, December 10 from 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM showcasing favorite Deadstök designs. It’s a sign! Beats by The Bangerz and grub by the WOW Truck.

Simon Malls Gift Card

I know, I know, gift cards are the last refuge of the uninventive and the desperate, but you know they work and they’re always appreciated. Here’s the beautiful thing: if you get a Simon gift card, the recipient can use it at either the Great Mall or Stanford Shopping Center, both of which are within the AllCamino jurisdiction. They’re good at Gilroy Premium Outlets too, which is pretty darn close to Monterey Road. How Camino is that?

Mixed Pastel Chocolate-Covered Fruits from Olson’s

C. J. Olson Cherries: Mixed Pastel Chocolate-Covered Fruits - 8 oz.: Ah, C. J. Olson Cherries, jewel of Sunnyvale. I’m crazy about the summer fruit they sell at the fruit stand, but when winter rolls around I’m all about their dried fruit. In particular I love the mixed pastels: Bing cherries, pears, blueberries, and Olson’s famous apricots dipped in creamy chocolate and sealed in a color-coded candy coating. Toothsome and tasty. Look for them at the San Jose and Oakland airports if you need to grab a quick gift on your way out of town.

C. J. Olson Cherries Pastels

The El Camino Book

California's El Camino Real and Its ... - Google Books This one is for the real El Camino afficionado: the book California’s El Camino Real and Its Historic Bells by Max Kurillo and Erline Tuttle. This is the only book I’ve read to date solely about the road and it contains history and photos you won’t find anyplace else. You can order it directly from California Bell Company.

Stanford A Cappella CD

Merchandising! Stanford University is a hotbed of collegiate a cappella music with nine diverse groups on campus at last count. They all have recordings available, and I’m pretty sure you can find their latest and greatest CDs at the Stanford Bookstore. If not, you can contact the groups directly, and some even sell their recordings through Amazon.com and other outlets. Check out “Through the Roof” by my old group, Fleet Street. Yes I’m shameless, but it’s my blog and I’ll plug if I want to.

See’s Candies Polar Bear Paws

Chocolates & Chocolate Gifts | See's Candies Ah, I just thought of something from San Mateo County! See’s Candies is headquartered in South San Francisco right on El Camino. Their retail stores, of course, can be found everywhere. I’ve actually never had their Polar Bear Paws but they sound awesome: white chocolate, roasted peanuts, and caramel. The perfect holiday treat.

See’s Candies

Happy shopping!

Posted in art, El Camino Real, Gilroy, meta, Milpitas, Monterey Road, Palo Alto, performances, retail, San Jose, South San Francisco, Stanford, Sunnyvale, The Alameda | 2 Comments »

Pounding Pavement for Peace on Patch

Friday, November 19th, 2010

So let me tell you about my Wednesday. I participated in the Shellmound Peace Walk, a ten-day walking tour around the Bay Area of sites sacred to the Ohlone Indians. I walked the first day, from Alviso Marina, through Milpitas, all the way to Fremont: ten miles. On the way I tweeted to Adelaide Chen of Milpitas Patch, a hyperlocal news site, that we were coming through town. She actually came out and met us in San Jose and talked me into writing an article and providing photos for the site! So here it is, my journalistic debut. I will follow up soon with a more personal account of my experience and the great people I met. I have tons to talk about.

Native Americans Visit Elmwood to Remember Burial Site (in Milpitas Patch)

A group promoting awareness of ancestral burial sites walked from Alviso to Fremont on the first day of the Peace Walk.

By Bill Moore

(that’s me!)
Read more >

Posted in El Camino Real, events, Fremont, Main Street, meta, Milpitas, news, Warm Springs Boulevard | No Comments »

Chris Gulker, Hyperlocal Hero

Friday, October 29th, 2010

I was saddened to learn that one of the founders of InMenlo passed away this week. Chris Gulker founded Menlo Park’s excellent hyperlocal web site with his wife Linda Hubbard Gulker in June 2009. I don’t know the Gulkers but I discovered InMenlo this past summer and thoroughly enjoyed its professional design, personal touch, and beautiful portrait photography as I scoured it for El Camino Real news. InMenlo immediately became an inspiration for AllCamino. Chris was an avid technologist and talented photo-journalist, and it shows in the web site.

As it turns out Chris is cited as being influential in the development of blogging. Through Gulker.com, the personal web site he started in 1995, he pioneered the ideas of the blogroll and link attribution, two elements which contributed to blogging becoming the inter-networked, mutually beneficial phenomenon that it is today.

Chris succumbed to brain cancer on October 27, 2010. He was 59. He will be missed not just by his family and friends but by the beloved Peninsula community he served so well. The global community of bloggershyperlocal and otherwiseowe him a debt of gratitude.

[Source: InMenlo]

Posted in El Camino Real, Menlo Park, meta, news, people, web | No Comments »

The Creative Process

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

I’ve been collecting a bunch of El Camino Real related Facebook pages and Twitter users, Liking and Following like crazy. Friday morning as I was surveying my vast social network I noticed people had statused and tweeted a bunch of great events coming up this weekend so I had the somewhat obvious but powerful idea of listing them in a blog post. I could even make this a regular feature, sharing with you upcoming weekend events. But then I had a quandary: what to call it?

“Weekend Update.” “Datebook.” “Event Calendar.” Too generic.

“What’s Up This Weekend.” Too long. “Weekend What’s Up.” Not bad but not there yet.

No, I want something related to El Camino Real. “Road Trip.” Too confusing. “Bell Whither.” Clever but not immediately gettable. “Mission Positions.” Ha! Those last two are great titles, but I’ll reserve them for another day.

Maybe I could use some Spanish. I pulled my old English-Spanish dictionary off the shelf and started thumbing through it. “Fin de Semana Real.” Bleah. “Sucesos.” Too obscure for non-Spanish speakers. “El Caminoticias.” I kinda like that, but then I’m a sucker for wordplay, “noticias” being Spanish for “news.” It may be better suited for a collection of news bites, which gave me another regular feature idea. But back to the business at hand…

“Mi Calendario Real.” Hmm…getting there. Bonus: it’s an anagram for “Arid El Camino Real.” How cool is that? Keep pushing. “El Calendario Real.” Clumsy. Hang on…wait…I think I’ve got it…

“El Camino Calendar.”

Perfect.

Okay, it’s a little boring and doesn’t really push any multilingual or punsterific boundaries. On the plus side though its meaning is obvious and it is reasonably unique. Best of all, it elegantly rolls off the tongue. It’s rhythmic, poetic, and polished.

Ship it. Click!

Posted in El Camino Real, events, meta | 1 Comment »

Old Counting Road

Monday, September 20th, 2010

Sorry, I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. As I completed my reverse bus trip down El Camino Real earlier this month I tallied many chain stores like fast food restaurants and grocery stores as well as other categories like gas stations and bike shops. I also kept track of every El Camino Real bell. I tallied everything on the southbound trip, but I didn’t count them until now. Here are the totals for both the southbound trip and the northbound trip last November. I got some nice results.

Name	East Bay East	Peninsula East	Peninsula West	Peninsula Total
Gas Station	4	24	23	47
El Camino Bell	1	25	18	43
Subway	2	5	8	13
Taco Bell	2	7	4	11
Jack in the Box	0	7	3	10
McDonald’s	3	1	9	10
Safeway	2	5	4	9
Blockbuster	0	7	1	8
Kragen	0	5	3	8
Burger King	1	5	2	7
KFC	0	5	2	7
Bicycle shop*	0	5	1	6
Lucky	0	4	2	6
Carl’s Jr.	0	2	2	4
Togo’s	0	2	2	4
In-n-Out Burger	0	0	2	2
The Off Ramp	0	2	0	2
Wendy’s	0	0	2	2
Midas*	0	0	1	1

* Under-counted due to inconsistent counting between trips

On every leg of the trip I only looked out the windows on the right side of the bus so I only saw one side of the road. The East Bay East column counts the businesses I passed heading north from San Jose to the Fremont BART station. It’s a short trip so the counts are low. I only made the trip in one direction so I only counted the east side of the road; I don’t have counts for the west side of the road at this time. The Peninsula East and West columns are for the long rides between San Jose and San Francisco. On the northbound trip I looked at the east side of the road, and southbound I looked west. The Peninsula Totals column is just that and does not include the East Bay counts. The main anomalies are bicycle shops and Midases because I didn’t count them consistently between the two trips so I know they are underrepresented in my table.

I’m delighted to see that bells are pretty much at the top of the list, outnumbered only by conglomerated gas stations regardless of brand. The original vision of the bell marker project in 1906 was to place them one mile apart on El Camino Real. It’s a 50-mile trip from San Jose to San Francisco and I counted 43 bells. There’s room for plenty more since I only saw one bell in San Francisco. It’s amazing how faithful Caltrans and the California Federation of Women’s Clubs have been to that original vision.

In the food department I’m surprised to see Subway at the top of the list with 13 stores though I shouldn’t be since they really do seem to be everywhere. I remarked on the northbound trip how there were 7 Taco Bells but only 1 McDonald’s. The southbound trip equalized the disparity with 4 Taco Bells but a whopping 9 McDonald’ses. Taco Bell still edges out McDonald’s with a total of 11 to 10, but that’s within the margin of error. The weird thing is how Taco Bell dominates the east side and McDonald’s dominates the west. The bell and the arch; the perfect symbols for the modern mission road.

My picks for which businesses to count were arbitrary. I don’t know why I didn’t count Starbucks; I regret the omission. On the southbound trip I wished I had been counting Walgreens and CVS drugstores because I saw a lot of them. Another unusually frequent chain was Holiday Inn Express. I think I saw half a dozen on the southbound trip alone. Car washes, car dealerships, hotels, and banks would also have been interesting to count.

The purpose of this is to embrace the vast stretches of El Camino which are zoned as commercial strip and celebrate the beauty in their homogeneity. They are home to pretty much every national and regional brand I can think of. Even so all these chain stores combined are a drop in the bucket. El Camino as I saw it is made up primarily of small businesses of every description from mom & pop dry cleaners to favorite local chain eateries. There are also homes, schools, municipal buildings, and open space. I can try to reduce this Royal Road to simple numbers, but the whole will always be greater than a count of its parts.

Posted in El Camino Real, First Street, Main Street, meta, Mission Boulevard, Oakland Road, restaurants, retail, San Jose Street, Santa Clara Street, The Alameda, transportation, Warm Springs Boulevard | 1 Comment »

Gone Hyperlocal

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

GoHyperlocal Logo AllCamino is now listed at GoHyperlocal.com! GoHyperlocal is a blog about producing and improving hyperlocal news web sites and it features a listing of such sites throughout the U.S. and U.K. I submitted AllCamino for their consideration and happily it was accepted. Here’s my listing.

“Hyperlocal” refers to the growing trend where news stories are being reported and published from and about small well-defined geographic regions such as cities or even neighborhoods. It contrasts with traditional media outlets which don’t have the bandwidth to report down to the same level of focused detail. The hyperlocal trend is yet another area where technology and the internet are democratizing the flow of information and putting powerful communication capability in the hands of individuals.

AllCamino does stretch the concept of hyperlocal. On the one hand it’s super-hyperlocal because it focuses on a single street, but on the other hand it’s inter-macroregional because it cuts across multiple cities, counties, even countries. Nevertheless I do fit GoHyperlocal’s profile as a small, independent, slightly obsessive blogger. I also satisfy their definition: “An independent news site dedicated to a physical location that we can point to on a map.”

Speaking of maps, GoHyperlocal maintains a Google map which pinpoints all their listed sites. It was a challenge for me to pick a single coordinate to represent AllCamino but I decided on 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara. That’s the address of Santa Clara University and I picked it because the immediate area contains so much of what AllCamino is about. There’s a mission, a university with athletic, cultural, and academic venues, a train station with a museum, and a transit center. There are residences nearby, businesses, and retail. It has it all. Even a bell. On a personal note it’s also pretty much the closest point on El Camino Real “proper” to my house.

GoHyperlocal is run by a fellow named Chad. He doesn’t just list other sites. He posts articles useful for the hyperlocal blogger such as story ideas, journalism principles, and critiques of what works and doesn’t work on hyperlocal sites. Surprisingly Chad doesn’t run a hyperlocal site himself. He started GoHyperlocal as a way to combine his interest in web technology and his background in sports journalism. He says of local sites, “They’re a much better way to get to know a place and its people than reading about it on some travel site or even in their city newspaper.” It’s meta-tourism.

I found GoHyperlocal when I was searching for other local blogs that encompass El Camino. I turned up the excellent InMenlo.com which is all about Menlo Park and Atherton. InMenlo is also listed at GoHyperlocal so one click led to another and here we are. GoHyperlocal is always looking for other suitable sites so if you know any, be sure to submit them.

Posted in El Camino Real, meta, Santa Clara, web | 2 Comments »

Around the Bay in a Day

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Last November I took a bus ride up El Camino Real from San Jose to San Francisco and blogged my impressions and observations. To avoid giving myself whiplash, that day I only looked out the right side of the bus at the eastern side of the street and doggedly ignored the left side so the job was only half done. Last Friday, September 3, 2010, I completed the task, taking the reverse bus trip from San Francisco down to San Jose, observing the west side. Back in November I scribbled all my notes on the bus by hand in a notebook and ended up taking four months to type them all up. It’s not that I’m a slow typist, it’s just that the scope of the project was much larger than I anticipated. For the second trip I found a more efficient way: I live-tweeted my journey.

If you’re unfamiliar with tweeting, it means I used my cell phone on the road to type and send text messages to the Twitter service. Twitter messages, or “tweets,” are limited to 140 characters each so it enforces brevity. A great advantage is that every message was timestamped and geocoded by GPS so I have a complete record of what I saw, when I saw it, and where I was. I tried to live in the moment and just write what was on my mind which means whatever happened to catch my eye out the bus window. I know it’s a pretty pedestrian read (irony intended) but I hope I conveyed a sense of El Camino’s diverse profile.

Below are my 167 tweets from that day from my brand new @allcamino twitter account. It took some effort to extract them all from Twitter’s web site. There are web apps that do this but they didn’t work for me because they rely on Twitter’s search engine which failed me, returning only six tweets (?!). I wrote a Perl script to convert their HTML to the format I wanted for the blog. To improve the readability I put each time stamp and location stamp against the right margin above each tweet. You can click the location links to open a Google map. My live-tweeting strategy worked great. Last year it took me four months to finish the writeup. Here I’ve done it in less than four days.

I cleaned the text up, fixing obvious two-left-thumb typos and grammar issues, but the content is largely raw and uncut. I’ve put a few editor notes in [square] brackets and added hyperlinks for your reference. I’ve written broader post-trip comments in between tweets in italics. You’ll see a bunch of the photos I took, many from the windows of the buses. Please excuse their quality. (more…)

Posted in art, Atherton, Belmont, Burlingame, Colma, Daly City, El Camino Real, First Street, Fremont, high school, history, Los Altos, Main Street, memories, Menlo Park, meta, Millbrae, Milpitas, Mission Boulevard, Mission Street, Mountain View, night life, Palo Alto, people, Redwood City, religion, restaurants, retail, San Bruno, San Carlos, San Francisco, San Jose, San Jose Street, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Clara Street, South San Francisco, Stanford, Sunnyvale, The Alameda, transportation, Warm Springs Boulevard, web | No Comments »

All Camino