The Savvy Boomer

The time for working from your home is here.

 When you travel 4500 miles on the road, you tend to notice that traffic can get a little heavy from time to time.  We passed through a few big cities including L.A., Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.  So here's my question. How on earth people can put up with the traffic congestion those cities have on a daily basis? 

Bumper to bumper on a 12 wide lane highway is not my idea of a good time.  Indeed, I'm sure  no one enjoys it and yet people who live in large metropolitan areas seem to put up with it every working day.  I just don't get it but I guess it's just proof that humans can get used to anything if need be.

The waste of gas from idling cars and the resultant pollution has to be staggering.  I have never had to drive more than 45 minutes to get to or from work and now, it's about 30 seconds to the computer.  I heard stories of up to 3 hours commuting-in each direction.  Interestingly enough, the worst traffic we hit was Seattle which is a very high tech city but it seems most people there still commute to their jobs.  Thank god for HOV lanes.

I guess people who do this somehow rationalize it to themselves.  They'd be better off trying to figure out how they can work from home. 

Driving with a GPS

 

Like many other gadgets I have purchased over the years, I wonder how I ever survived without the technology of the latest gadget-a GPS.  I purchased a TOMTOM 930 and quickly came to rely on it for our recent 4500 mile trip.  After you input the address or location you want to go (either by touch screen or voice input) it  guides you to your destination on a turn by turn basis and even tells you the best lane to be in on multi-lane highways.  The best thing is that if you miss a turn or don't follow its directions, it instantly recalculates your route and starts issuing new directions to get you back on track.  There are a variety of standard voices and languages to choose from and you can download many more, some of which are fee based.  It comes standard with maps for the US. Canada and Europe with many other countries available for a fee.

Okanagan wineries can learn from Sonoma

If you are a Canadian, you know that some decent wines are produced in the Okanagan district of British Columbia. Some of these wines have even won some prestigious medals in tasting contests around the world.  I'm not going to go into the details of such an extensive and subjective topic as wines but if you click on this link, you can get a good idea of wineries in the Okanagan.

The fact that a lot of their wines sell out has resulted in an "attitude" that some of these wineries have developed.  I call it the "snob" factor and after visiting a few in the past month, I was quite surprised that about 50% of them had the snob factor and one of the tasting rooms employed an individual who bordered on rude and treated us like we were intruding on her-and we were the only people there.   It reminded me a lot of why I don't go to Napa anymore although I still drink some Napa wines.  The only exceptions of very friendly staff I found were at Lake Breeze and Elephant Island.

A few days later on our road trip, we ended up in the Sonoma area of California where we visited approximately 10 wineries.  I can honestly say that we didn't encounter one snob attitude.  As a matter of fact, most of the employees were incredibly hospitable and anxious to share their knowledge.  When I made a comment to 1 person about how much friendlier the people seemed to be in the Sonoma area compared to Napa area, he just rolled his eyes and said "We call it the dark side-Napa is an auto parts company, not a wine area."

Yes, there are a few decent Okanagan wines and wineries, but given that the products cost almost as much as Sonoma based wines, I'll be sticking to the Rodney Strongs, Chateau St. Jeans and Foppianos in the forseeable future.  Okanagan wineries can take a lesson not only in their winemaking but also their customer service from Sonoma. 

The Savvy Boomer takes a tip from John Belushi

OK bear with me for a sec. here.  If you were lucky enough to be around when John Belushi was in his prime, then you saw two of the funniest (IMHO) movies ever made- the Blues Brothers and Animal House.  In both movies, parts of the plot revolved around a road trip.

Well, after watching the nosedive of the markets and house prices, we decided we needed to deal with it all by taking a road trip.  3 weeks driving from Vancouver B.C. through the interior of B.C., WA., OR., CA., NV., UT., ID and back, logging over 7,000km on the trusty Accord.

I didn't blog while I was gone because I wanted to make sure my whereabouts were "double secret probation," but now that I'm back  I've got a whole bunch of new material to blog about including a few (OK- quite a few) wineries, micro beers, casinos, observations about regional driving habits, roadkill, hotels, restaurants (both fine dining and fast-food), wild discrepancies in gas prices (and dealing with trying to use a Canadian credit card at self-serve pumps), a new perspective on Vegas, potential places to live in winter months once we finally retire and my new favorite gadget, a TomTom GPS.

Stay tuned.