Charles Poulsen

Its been about two months since I last posted, and nope this isn’t about the election, although I’m very pleased with the result! This is about my little trip I took there a couple of months ago.

In August/Sept, I went on a work trip to San Francisco Bay Area, to work in our companies product development team. It was a pretty good experience, but 2 weeks really isn’t enough. On the way, there was a few flight stuff-ups which resulted in me spending the night in Washington D.C. So I made the most of it by doing some site-seeing. I saw the White House, Capitol Building, Abraham Lincoln Memorial, George Washington Memorial, Thomas Jefferson Memorial, and some others that I just can’t remember. Anyway you can check my washington photos out here on flickr.

So then I finally got to San Francisco, and stayed about 30 minutes out down at Redwood Shores. Heres some photos of our headquarters and of the area. From there I worked by day, and checked the area out by night and weekend. I stayed in the Hilton in San Francisco city on the weekend. I saw Santa Cruz, Napa Valley, Mavericks (although there were no waves), Half Moon Bay, and probably some other things that I’ve forgotten by now! You can check out photos from San Francisco here on flickr.

So since I was heading that way back to London, I decided to take a trip to Denver to stay with my Aunty and Uncle, Niel and Alice. They live in Golden which is just in the Rocky Mountains. So that was a chilled out few days, with one exception, the big mountain climb. Mick and I decided to climb Mt Bierstadt which is about 14000 Feet. To get an idea of how high this is: Denver is about 5000 feet (1 mile above sea level), Niel and Alices place is about 7000 feet. For Mt Bierstadt you start at about 11000 ft, and go up to 14000 ft. Thats 4.26 Kilometres above sea level! So it took us about 2 hours to reach the summit. Every few steps you are really tired and you need to rest. Eventually we got there, and the view was amazing. At the top, you are very dizzy. After signing the register, taking some photos and videos etc (see below), we took a 1 hr walk back to the car. Both of us were feeling like absolute crap at this stage! Probably some form of altitude sickness or something.

The next day, I took a trip to Vail (ski resort for millionaiires) to check it out. It’s a really nice town but theres no snow in summer. Would love to go back one day in winter.

So that was the trip over, and it was time to head back to the UK for the move to London, which I’ll write about in the next post! Bye bye USA.