Time Frame: August 29 — October 6, 2010
Miles Driven: 344
Our daily pictorials from Burning Man 2010 should wrap up our time there:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
After a summer of travel with essential stopping points, plans, emergencies, lots of social time and time lines – we had intentionally left everything post-Burning Man up to serendipity to decide. When we left the playa, we literally had not much of a game plan other than retrieving Kiki from her kitty-sitter. We contemplated heading up to PermaBurn – the year round Burning Man inspired community in northern California, San Francisco or finding somewhere off-grid and away from people.
Mostly we were craving somewhere to set up with decent connectivity for a while to launch a few work related projects.
Sacramento
First stop was back in Sacramento, where we keep our storage unit – we needed to put the playa covered Burning Man gear back in storage. Upon arriving to our friend’s home where we base out of, we were asked if we could house and cat sit for the remainder of the week. Perfect! A place where we could put Burning Man behind us without feeling like we’d be in anyone’s way, at the same time feeling like we were helping out. It was awesome to take care of business, shake off the dust and repack the house at a slower pace.
San Francisco
Even towards the end of our time in Sacramento, we had no firm plans for afterwards. And serendipity sure wasn’t voicing an opinion loudly. Chris, by the way, thrives on the unknown. For me however, it’s outside my default operating space and I can start to get stressed and agitated, especially if I’m already at my exhaustion point. So I pushed for a plan to formulate. After so much motion in the months leading up to this point, I wanted to know when we could put down the landing gear and really get caught up.
We decided fairly last minute to follow our calling to San Francisco. It looked like our friends Sam & Tracy of ZenNomads would be able to meet up there – and that seemed like as good a plan as any. It’s always fun to show off San Francisco!
The thing about San Francisco however is.. it’s not a place to go when you feel you need chill and relax time. It is so full of awesome, opportunity and amazing people – it can either be highly distracting & inspiring or completely overwhelming & intimidating. Add on top of that, both Chris and I having a lot of community there – San Francisco is anything but a relaxing place for us. We tried our best to make it more on the inspiring than overwhelming side.
We literally made the plans and hit the road west within a few hours, and in that time period – e-mails and text messages started pouring in. Invitations to meet up, attend conferences as guests, present/speak. Instead of pulling in and getting grounded for a couple days, we hit the ground running – first attending the AppNation conference for iPhone app developers, where we were offered free booth space to pimp our app, State Lines. And then we were asked to be ambassadors at the Meet, Plan, Go! meetup (a great event, and wonderful to meet so many folks itching to leave the cubicle world to travel). Visits with friends (including nearby nomads, Shonda & Michael) piled on top of that – and before we knew it our first week was up and we had hardly done anything we intended to do just for us.
We also had a very kind offer from a blog reader looking to hit the road himself – Matt of MuscleActivate, invited us to his studio to sample his muscle activation techniques. He did some body work on us both (even alleviating pain in my hip that had been there for years!) and taught us a lot about muscle mechanics. He even gifted us with custom made strengthening cords to attach to our trailer to improve our fitness on the road! Amazing experience with an amazing person living his art.
Sam & Tracy then joined up with us, parked next door – expanding our neighborhood social network. It’s great being camped with them, as they’re also balancing a tech career in with traveling. So we can co-work, co-inspire and then have happy hour together. It was good to focus more on work projects, and I even closed on my new software development contract and was able to get that in motion.
The invitations for meetups and events continued to fly in.. to a point of overwhelm on top of everything else going on in our lives. Which of course included considering the unexpected serendipity to regear our focus to winter in St. John. We eventually got to a point where we surrendered ourselves to the idea that we just weren’t going to experience San Francisco this time around as much as we intended, and canceled a week’s worth of social engagements. But of course, not first without dressing Sam & Tracy up in leather and exploring Folsom Street Fair. And we did make it a priority to spend an afternoon hanging out with our friends Christine, Drew & Cole Gilbert (AlmostFearless) before they headed off for their tour of Asia filming the digital nomad documentary.
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All and all, trying to spend a month in San Francisco was probably not the exact right idea for what our mental needs were. It was certainly however the perfect juxtaposition for jumping on the opportunity of being in St. John for several months with limited social opportunity to focus on work, and on ourselves. We booked our tickets to St. John (thus setting the count down clock), left a week remaining on our San Francisco RV space and pulled out the other evening – starting our cross country journey before parking the rig and flying away for a while.
You guys got to hang out with Sam and Tracy!?
::Jealous::