Surge 2

Sunday December 4th saw us heading out to Riverside CA again - this time it is going to be a full 2 weeks.

We used Uber for the first time and it is so cool, on Saturday evening, Gerald booked a ride for 4:15 on Sunday morning to take us to the airport.  We walked out to the street and watched the progress of our ride on the app.  Credit card was entered into the app when we booked and it was such a pleasure to be picked up effortlessly without worrying if the ride was going to be there on time - our driver Terrance was very friendly and dropped us off at the Southwest entrance well in time for us to get to the gate in time for boarding.  We were both TSA approved so everything was a breeze.

We got in to Ontario airport around 9 am local time, picked up the rental car and took a long scenic route into Riverside. stopping off at some parks along the way, while deciding what to do with our day.  We stopped at a local mexican  eatery where we could see that locals were eating - we shared a great brunch and decided to go up to mount Rubidoux.  The weather was lovely and we were lucky enough to find a parking space at one of the trail heads.  It turned out to be a clear day and much warmer than expected so those jeans that we had chosen to wear for the cold morning start soon turned out to be warmer than we really would have like.   

The hike up to the top has really amazing views and is a nice climb but not too steep - it has an elevation of 1,399'.  Although there is a paved trail to the top, we opted to take a steeper unpaved trail on the lover elevation, picking up the paved trail about a third of the way up.  It is a fairly easy walk with several historical points of interest along the way and the view from the cross at the top is amazing.

After that great exercise we treated ourselves to some really good caramel coffee and an orange  pastry at the Coffee Bean while waiting for our room to be ready.  At the end of the day, a beautiful sunset from our room then supper at Sam Bann Thai - wow what a great curry that was again.

Right now it is Festival of Lights time here in Riverside and the lights are really incredible especially at the famed Mission Inn.  The streets are packed with people from all over the place, here just to see this this display of Christmas lights .. I was like a kid in Disneyland as yet another magical display came into site round each corner.  Going to have to find an event free evening to take my camera out to record this.

My lunch time walks are an opportunity to discover hidden gems - one day I stumbled across Tio's Tacos - apparently also pretty famous.  It is truly a folk art wonderland with all the art objects made out of trash - there are many 20' (or bigger?) 'people' built out of wire frames filled with tin cans, milk jugs etc. using the tall palms as the central core to build from.  I only saw a tiny fraction of what I have since learned is there and apparently the food is pretty good too.  This is a cultural must see and there is a beer bottle shrine and so many amazing pieces to discover, each with it's own story.  This is going to need a visit with time enough (and my camera) to do it justice.

I also discovered a pair of lakes (Fairmont and Evans) and the most amazing houses that I have ever seen.  It is also incredible to see all the citrus trees in everyone's yards - orange, lemon, tangerine and grapefruit trees laden with so much fruit that it is unharvested and dropping to the ground.  One day I picked a couple of tangerines from a branch hanging over the sidewalk and they were the most beautiful tangerines that I remember having eaten.

The gatherings are legendary for this group.

Starting with our daily breakfast gatherings - everyone knows whose sits where and the staff know to bring Mindy's hazelnut creamer and Gerald's orange juice.  We practice our Spanish with the omelette chef.

Some notable evenings (too many to remember them all):

Thomson Reuters hosted a cocktail party and taco supper for all these hard working surgers at the hotel.  It was a lot of fun and the Marriott laid out some good quality food but the deserts really stole the show!

The Yard House at Tyler was quite an experience, I don't recommend sitting near that door to patio in winter but the food and beer and especially the company were worth freezing for.

It did start getting difficult to find somewhere new to eat around here especially with all the crowds coming into 'our space' for the lights festival.  It is so crowded everywhere but one evening Mindy expertly steered us to The Hideaway and it became my favorite place.  It really is hidden away down in the basement of a building opposite one side of the Mission Inn.  What a genuine place with an incredible mix of people - it was noisy and there was live music playing most of the evening, a great atmosphere and a great place to let your hair down and relax with real people, no pretences, no airs and graces.  Gerald and I split a Cuban Sandwich - we had seen these made on one of those travel programs that we love to watch on TV and this one certainly lived up to the expectations.

For those of you who really want to know what is behind that door - the exit that only Gerald and I found.  Here is proof that it is more than an emergency only exit :)

It is so nice to be able to walk to supper and walk back to the hotel afterwards, somehow there is always something different to see on every walk around this town - nothing has changed but you just notice different things every time that you go out.

Saturday 9:10 AM - Celebrate good times - 2 test cases just passed !
10:30 AM - another 2 test cases passed
11:15 AM - taking care of business, yet another test case passed!
2:15 PM - and yet another one, taking care of business, working overtime.
2:50 PM - is this for real?? Test case number 7 just passed and that was AFTER Connie said that we should finish early at 3:30 because we have made such good progress.  This is amazing.

Great job everyone !

Just to finish the surge off right, Friday - last day of Surge 2 ends with a total of 41 TCs passed on this surge and a 222 of 311 overall.

I am so proud to be part of your family and your successes !

Can you believe that I am actually looking forward to surge 3 - save a seat for me Gerald, I am going to be joining you 'in the office' :)

Celebrating 41 Tests Cases passed out of the goal of 40 - way to GO guys !

On our last night here, we finally got a table at La Bella Tratoria at the Mission Inn.  In fact when we got there at around 5:30 we were told that they were already booked for the evening so we wandered off.  Now THIS is amazing customer service, we had wandered to the other end of the inn, amongst the (not so bad) crowd and the host came running up to us and told us that is we still wanted to be seated, they had just had a cancellation.  Wow, amazing huh?

We were serenaded by carol singers that are hired by the Chamber of Commerce for the season. The singing was beautiful and the singers so obviously loved what they were doing.

Anyhow we had a lovely meal and I can recommend the Barbabietola (beet and goat cheese antipasti) and the Inn Keepers Pasta.  There is a great ambiance there, classy without being over priced or snobbish and the patio seating with outdoor heating is perfect even on a cooler mid-December evening.  Great finish to this surge.

Sunday November 30th 2016

Gerald needs to 'go into the office' for a grueling week - this time 'the office' is in Riverside, California so we are up at 4 am and heading out to the airport 30 minutes later.

We flew Southwest to Phoenix and then on to Ontario airport in Riverside.  It was my first time flying Southwest and it was a really good experience.  Our first flight was on a 737-800, designed for 215 passengers but we had only 49.  We were literally told to pick our own row and spread out for this super smooth 2 and half hour flight into Phoenix.  The flight staff were very friendly and of course quite laid back, nothing was too much trouble for them.  We got to watch the horizon glowing with the early stages of sunrise as we started our descent into Phoenix.

Two hours in Phoenix airport gave us a chance to grab a bite for breakfast and then head out on exploring trip to stretch our legs.  There are some very impressive glass etchings of  historical aircraft along the windows of the skybridge between two terminals.  The are in pairs in wing shaped glass panels and are drawings with technical data, along with some poetry and prose.  I later found out that these drawings are etch on the glass by a high powered CO2 laser instead of the usual sand-blasting.  This process actually fractures the glass and breaks it at a microscopic level which allow light to pass through it in the same way as it passes through a prism - this means that the drawings sparkles because of the colors as you pass by them. 

We picked up a Corolla at Ontario airport and I didn't recognize it as a Corolla, it looks absolutely nothing like my little blue Corolla that took us on so many adventures and commutes between Colorado and Montana - it is so much bigger, has a heads-up display and some other improvements.

It was only about 10 am when we left the airport, too early to check into the hotel and we were ready for an adventure (yeah what is new right?) and headed off to Salton Sea.  Gerald had seen a program about this shallow rift lake below sea level and right on the San Andreas Fault in the Imperial and Coachella valleys - and it went straight onto his bucket list because he has never been below sea level.  Hmm forgetting Amsterdam where some parts of the city are 6 feet below sea level?  Salton sea is actually about 35 miles long, 15 miles wide and 226 feet below sea level.  At one time there was a thriving community living there and a marina.  What we saw now was far from thriving and the marina was very high and dry.  Now the city is nothing more than a collection of ramshackle trailers in the desert next a smelly but fascinating inland salt lake.  The beach is a mix of crushed fish bones from the millions of fish that have died here and of course the salt.  You can see fish skeletons in so many different stages of pulverisation but amazingly there are still tilapia living in this sea - they were introduced way back when and still tolerate the high salt and pollution levels.

On Monday I saw news  that a second swarm of earthquakes had hit in the area, this was the second set of earthquakes there in two months and it looks as though we just missed this one !

 On the way out to Salton Sea we had passed what appeared to be 'farms' of palm trees of various sizes and there were bags hanging from some of these so of course we had to go and investigate.  We found that these were date palms and the bags were covering the 'fruits' - neither of us had ever seen dates growing and we managed to walk around among the trees and even taste a couple of dates fresh off the trees.  It is amazing how much fruit hangs from a single bunch, how many bunches hang down from each frond and how many fronds each tree has.  The bags were muslin and apparently they are to keep the insects and birds from the fruit as well as to catch any dates that ripen earlier than the others. on one street corner we saw a vendor selling boxes of medjool dates - $15 for five pounds !

After taking a walk around the date farm we drove a bit deeper into the farmland and fields of citrus trees, mostly  lemons with some grapefruit. The ground around the trees was smothered in dropped fruit and a lot of the fruit on the trees had brown rot so we are guessing that this was a bumper crop that may have got hit by some wet weather.

Half a mile or so down the road we came across a field of something growing at low level that had a type of leaf that almost looked like some type of fern frond.  Lucky me, I saw a farmer drive along the edge of his field in an ATV so I asked him what he was growing - of course he looked at me as though I was some sort of crazy person who must have fallen off another planet before he told me that they are artichoke.  I explained that in Montana we grow sugar beets and grain so I had never seen artichoke growing before - still I felt like one of those city slickers that thought a cow was a buffalo or something.

After our adventures we started heading back the hundred plus miles to find our hotel.  We had to join the huge exodus from all the desert 4 wheeling weekend fun back to the city - you can't imagine all of the hundreds of vehicles and campers on the road hauling their 4-wheelers back home.  It made me think of all the snowmobilers heading back home after a Montana winter weekend - just multiply that by many hundred percent and you may get the picture. 

In general, driving in California is so much worse than driving in the City of San Antonio, there are just so many more vehicles that I can almost understand why road rage is more prevalent here.

Look at the view from our hotel room, nice place to work from :)