San Francisco!

I flew out to San Francisco on Jan 27th for a weekend Team In Training Tier 2 Coach certification clinic (in Walnut Creek). The program didn't start until early Friday, but I decided to take an early flight to SFO so that my uncle, who lives in the wine country north of the city, could show me some of the sights.

It was an uneventful drive to the Denver airport, and except for the overhead bins filling up as I was half-way to my seat and I had to go back to the jetway (through all those people) and gate check my bag, the flight went well. We actually arrived about 30 minutes early, and because I gate checked the bag, it was one of the first on the carousel.

My uncle Mark, aka Mr. Mark.

My uncle picked me up and the first thing we did was navigate to a gourmet donut shop. A few years back he had tried to open up a similar shop where he lives, but the market was just too small to be successful. This shop seemed to be doing well. Dynamo Donuts. The treat of the day was the maple apple bacon donut. Yes. Bacon on the donut! I know this isn't metabolically efficient, but days like today, special circumstances, make it important to enjoy food opportunities.

Yes, those are bacon bits on the donut on the left!

After the donut shop, we hit up some of the museums. First up was the SFMoMA where we took in the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit, which was phenomenal photographic jounalism and some of the first work with 35mm cameras. We were in there for quite a while and both were getting hungry, so refueling was critical before hitting the next museum so we had lunch in the cafe. We actually both went with the BBQ shortrib sandwich. Another good choice!

After lunch we headed down the street to the Cartoon Art Museum. The main exhibit was comic strips from jewish women. These weren't your "light" comics. This museum also had some cool original drawings of the Warner Bros cartoons - Bugs, Sylvester, Tweetie Bird, tons! When we had enough of this one, we went to visit a friend of his at an art gallery.

Jack Fischer was putting together an exhibit from two artists, Richard Bassett and Chris Crites. It was an interesting take on violence. (Note: interesting is a word used to describe art when you don't know how to describe it.) One artist made these needlepoint crafted pillows of the Kennedy assasination and other pillows with surveillence camera images from gun-based robberies. The other had bright colored portraits of what appeared to be famous bank robbers. These were painted on a canvas made from brown paper bag (large yard waste bags).

After visiting with Jack for a few minutes, we took a quick walk through a photography exhibit - portraits of pretty unique characters found in major California cities. Then it was time for me to head to Walnut Creek so I got dropped off at Mission & 2nd and hoofed it a couple blocks to Market St where I could get a ride on BART to the hotel.

I don't use public transportation much, but I was able to successfully get on the right train (I didn't even have to wait but a couple minutes) and get to the right station, and then find the hotel a couple blocks from the station!

Perfect hotel for a 3-day coach training session!

Once I checked in - this is a sweet place- Renaissance Sport Club - I was able to relax some, get a metabolically efficient dinner (mixed greens with tuna salad and an apple), and hit the hay pretty early, as it was going to be a long weekend!