Aku Aku

QotD: Best Road Trip Ever

What was your favorite road-trip of all time? 
Submitted by bodhibound. 

I've had a lot of great road trips, but I think I can pick a favorite based on how fun and absurd it was. In March of 1997 I rented an economy sized car with three other people, two of whom I had never met before, and we drove non-stop from Durham, North Carolina to Austin, Texas to see "The Unexpected Destruction of Elaborately Engineered Artifacts : A Misguided Adventure in Risk Eradication, Happening Without Known cause, in Connection With Events That are Not Necessarily Related", a show by Survival Research Laboratories. That's 2,623 miles round trip to see a group from San Francisco that we'd only read a little bit about on the web manipulate industrial sized fire-breathing robots through a field cluttered with provocative art and cow carcasses. We arrived a few hours before the show, had our minds blown and then drove back right after the show. On the way back we swung through New Orleans to spend about 6 lusciously drunken hours on Bourbon Street before heading back to North Carolina. We never stopped driving except to get gas, see the show and drink on Bourbon Street. That little car got a bit funky.

The entire trip took 72 hours. With the stop in New Orleans it was over 2673 miles.

Nrwalk1

Image: Nicole Rosenthal

I'll never forget the look on the rental car agent's face when I turned the car in and she checked the odometer. Priceless. Seeing SRL in action played no small part in making San Francisco attractive to me. I moved here in October of 1997 and in June of 1998 I worked for SRL on their What is Real show held under the highway in SF.

San Francisco in 1971 and other wide eye openers

Sf71

A colleague sent me this wonderful large panorama shot of San Francisco taken from atop the Bay Bridge in 1971. Don't click on the tiny picture here, click on the link in the previous sentence to see it in a large horizontal scrollable size.

I took a great Dogpatch City Guides tour once that talked about those huge buildings in the Dogpatch/China Basin area (the left side of the photo, on the bay side of Potrero Hill), but I can't remember now what they were exactly. I know there was some ship building going on, but I feel like they were some other sort of manufacturing. Steel maybe? Anyone know?

This photo is from  the site of Brad Templeton (of EFF fame, among other things). He has many more similar but more recent panoramic photos available for viewing and purchase, including other places besides San Francisco as well. Here's a shot he took at Burning Man 2000, my first year there.