ALB-ORD-SFO

After months of anticipation, I left for San Francisco this morning. No flight or luggage snafus, but the flight from ALB to ORD was torture: the fellow who sat to my right spent the entire flight flirting obnoxiously with the young woman sitting to his right (He predicted the crash of the tech bubble! He speaks at investment seminars! He's appeared on the Canadian equivalent of CNBC several times!) Ugh.

The flight from ORD to SFO was a lot better, even though I sat in front of a couple of toddlers who were not happy about being trapped in a metal tube for hours. Their father apologized for the commotion, and I told him about my morning and said that I would much rather listen to his kids than to an on-the-make investment guru. He cracked up and said that he blogged about stuff like that. I told him that the thought had certainly crossed my mind . . . .

Landed at SFO this afternoon, took BART into the city, walked through tourist hell (aka the intersection of Powell and Market), and made it to my hotel. The accommodations aren't deluxe( kind of like a cross between a dorm room and a spartan studio apartment--which is not surprising given that it was at one point a single-room occupancy apartment building) but it meets my needs and my budget. It's actually kind of quaint in a European sort of way. (It's also populated in a European sort of way: the night manager, who checked me in, told me that I'm the only American here at the moment and that all of the other guests are taking advantage of the Euro's buying power here in the States.)

At some point, my room had a Murphy bed . . . .