In celebration of their newest Mileage Plus Credit Card, United held an event in downtown San Francisco today (and tomorrow). I made the decision to go during lunch to see if I could win the 1,000,000 mile grand prize.
I met up with Imran (red t-shirt), being a like-minded (and most importantly, Mileage Plus member) flying fan, at Justin Herman Plaza for our shot at winning the big prizes. Giveaway aside, the weather in SF was phenomenal.
They actually brought a legit baggage carousel covered with a variety of prize bags filled with goodies. They actually gave away a number of great prizes while we were in the vicinity: at least two folks within earshot won 25,000 miles each and another two folks won 14 megapixel cameras.
Some of the bag styles you could choose from included large duffle, soft-sided briefcase, backpack and, what I decided to grab, the medium duffle. The "basic" prize that I really wanted to avoid was a simple hat. Luckily, I scored a nice vacuum-sealed thermos and 5,000 miles (roughly 1/5 the total required for a roundtrip ticket) for all my trouble.
Pretty innovative way to advertise for your credit card and I applaud United/Mileage Plus/Chase for setting all this up and giving away some meaningful gifts. Now to figure out a cool place to go using those miles I just won. Hope you all had a good wednesday too!
Not a very imaginative title, I'll admit, but I don't have many pictures to share and I can't think of any other words to tie them all together. I apologize for not putting these up a bit sooner, but have a look.
So a few weekends ago, Kurt came out to the west coast for a visit en route to the south and we sought out some good eats. We ate at "Off the Grid", a food truck meet-up in San Francisco which went undocumented by my camera unfortunately. While delicious, the sheer number of folks (including ridiculous lines for the numerous trucks) ruined it just a little bit. Anyways, we went to the opposite end of the Bay Area a couple days after to check out the Gilroy Garlic Festival (my first time going in the four-ish years I've lived up here). We went early so that made the overall experience pretty enjoyable as that spared us some of the pain of long lines and extreme traffic.
The line for the free garlic ice cream stretched on for a while, but they operated with impressive efficiency and we didn't wait too long to get ours. More like a soft serve rather than the true ice cream I ate at the last garlic festival I attended (at Ward Warehouse in HI, circa 1999?). Pretty good. Tasted very much like vanilla with a strong garlic aftertaste.
So they had a tent with "Hawaiian" BBQ chicken kebabs and, being good local boys, we decided to check it out.
No self-respecting garlic festival would dare occur without a solid garlic fry offering, and Gilroy doesn't disappoint. Just look at how much garlic we collected off the top of the fries. No arguing that these fries packed legitimate potency.
And then last weekend, fellow USC/Hawaii friends, Claudia, Jeanine, Ryan and Kellie all came up for a visit and we spent a day up in San Francisco eating and enjoying the excellent weather. We started the day out at the ferry building for the weekly Farmers' Market (an event I also took Kurt to) and we slowly (MUNI had some problems so it literally took us a long time) made our way west to Golden Gate Park, where we took this picture in front of Stow Lake. The gang had an impressive showing from other friends who now live near the Bay Area and I met some other cool folks during our urban excursion.
Finally, I'll end with a pic of Monday night's dinner: French toast sandwiches. Mari has wanted to make this for a really long time so we finally got around to it. Sandwiched between the two slices of french toast, we put provolone cheese, spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes and turkey breakfast sausage patties. Finally, we drizzled pure maple syrups (yes, plural...we sampled two different kinds) over the top to impart just a touch of sweetness. Yum.
Alrighty, I don't have any other pics at the moment so you'll have to make do with those. I promise I'll get a little update on my new job next time around since I'm just about to wrap up week 3. Until next time.
Hi, I know you guys all come here to read the great articles, but I wanted to take a brief moment to draw your attention to the column on the left. While the majority of my blog, including format, background and general layout, remain much as they did when I started this thing a number of years ago, a bit has changed. Particularly, I've updated the left column with RSS links, Post Archive, Tags, Reader, Links and Acknowledgements.
The RSS links ("Subscribe to") allow savvy readers to subscribe to the blog feed and get updates delivered as you so desire.
The Post Archive ("Old Posts") allows you to look back on all the great memories from the past organized conveniently in chronological order.
The Tags ("Labels") section allows you to view posts which fall into specific (and often self explanatory) categories which I have predetermined.
The new Reader ("Suggested Reading") area highlights the five most recent articles from my Google Reader that I have found interesting enough to share (sometimes even with a brief comment below the link in italics).
The "Links" section highlights a few of my favourite websites around the web including news, entertainment and even a couple other blogs.
Finally, the Acknowledgements ("Thanks...") section gives a quick shout out to some of the things which power the blog and make it possible for me to share all these great pictures, comments, stories and such.
I hope that helps a little with the navigation around the blog and perhaps it has pointed out something new that you may not have previously noticed. I've been a bit lax with some of the posting recently (Deryck even called me out on it) but I have had a lot going on with a new job and just life in general. Hope to get back to it soon! Stay tuned!
I went to Stanford and visited Cantor Art Center's latest installation: Richard Serra's "Sequence". You can see a few more (professional) photos by clicking here.
Posts
