Sunday, 5 January 2003
11:59pm
| S |
Although the cars were really the main attraction, I'd say that the two highlights of the trip really were the flying jeep-blimp thingy, and the diagonal crosswalk. The flying jeep is this blimp-like thing that is shaped like a jeep, is about 2/3rds of the size of a jeep, and is controlled by radio control. Definitely one of the coolest radio controlled vehicles I have ever seen, even if it would be useless outside where even the slightest gust of wind would probably knock it hopelessly off course.
The diagonal crosswalk can be found at the corner of 5th Ave and Market Street. For those of you unfamiliar with San Diego's "Gaslamp Quarter", it's pretty much the big night spot in town, right in the middle of Downtown San Diego. There's a bunch of restaurants, bars, clubs, and shops you can check out. Anyway, at night the pedestrian traffic gets really heavy, and causes vehicular traffic because the pedestrians and cars are fighting for the same space in the intersection. Well they recently put this diagonal crosswalk thing in there, where all of the cars have red lights in all 4 directions, and all of the pedestrians on all four corners walk at the same time. Thus, cars that are trying to turn right or left never have to wait for a bunch of pedestrians to go.
Now I know there are some diagonal crosswalks in other parts of the country, but this is the first time I have ever seen one, and to me, that makes all the difference. Anyway, the novelty of walking through the middle of a busy interesection was fun enough to make it the other real highlight of the day. You can see the pics I took at my repository of pics.
Tuesday, 7 January 2003
11:59pm
| E |
A funny thing happened when the power went out the 2nd time... when it came back on, the fire alarm went off... and these sorta strobe light type flashy things would flash every 5 seconds or so... the one in the bathroom was totally messing with the infrared sensors on the automatic faucets... every time the light would flash the water would turn on haha. When I left the bathroom I saw all the slot machines rebooting. Luckily, they have some mechanism of saving how much money you had in the machine so nobody lost anything.
Anyway, I decided to drive home. The power was out everywhere. Barona I guess was running on backup generators. The wind was going crazy, especially in certain passes. At some points there was so much dust and rocks being kicked up my car was literally being sandblasted while visibility went down to practically zero.
The rest of the time I was literally dodging flying branches, and fallen tree limbs hidden around blind corners (this is a mountain road i'm going down)... when I got to the bottom, there was a line of like 7 or 8 cop cars... they were sitting around a downed power line... all of the street lights were out,except the signal lights were still working...
what's really weird is that it was really warm. At 4am it was 71 degrees out... and according to some reports, some of the gusts of wind in the foothills (where I was) reached 100 miles per hour, and I believe it as it was definitely trying to sneak in through the crack between the window and the door!
It wasn't until I woke up in the morning that I was really able to inspect my car for damage, and I did find two new scratches on the driver's side, but otherwise, no dents or anything like that. But I did notice that just down the street a huge pine tree fell over. I tried to get a pic of it before the clean up crew disposed of the whole thing. There was also a tree limb in the driveway of my apartment complex that had fallen. Weather sucks.
Wednesday, 8 January 2003
11:59pm
| C |
