Photo by Steve Rish

– Doug McConnell

Many visitors come to San Francisco to see its famous landmarks and tourist attractions, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the cable cars and Fisherman’s Wharf, and that makes good sense. Add to them the City’s revitalized waterfront, the Presidio, Land’s End, Ocean Beach, Golden Gate Park, the Market Street Railway and the be-domed beauty of City Hall for starters, and there’s a lot to see in San Francisco.

But what often gets overlooked by those who visit or even live here is what I think most distinguishes San Francisco, its diverse neighborhoods. Check out the Haight, the Castro, and Chinatown, for example, and then go to one of our newest stories and spend some time in the cultural crossroads of the Mission District. San Francisco is a fascinating mosaic of neighborhoods perched on hills and nestled in valleys, each with its own history and character. San Francisco is really many cities in one, and deserves and warrants all the visits you can make.

Photo by robh

– Doug McConnell

Here at OpenRoad.TV we focus on the big, broad and beautiful West, from Alaska to Mexico and the Rockies to Hawaii. It’s a pretty nice territory to live in and explore, and we hope you find ideas here that will help guide your travels.

But our fundamental concept is that, no matter where you travel on earth and no matter where you happen to be, if you slow down and look and listen carefully, you’ll find terrific stories, adventures, characters and experiences that will enrich your life. After wandering around all my life in search of curiousities and tales to tell, I’m convinced there are fascinating treasures to discover everywhere….and they’re usually hiding in plain sight right under our noses. I love to go to the far corners of the earth on grand journeys, but I also like to poke around my own neighborhood to be surprised and learn something new.

So it was when we shot a story recently on San Francisco’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf. The Wharf is one of the San Francisco’s most popular tourist destinations, so much so that locals tend to stay away in droves. It’s sometimes said that if you live in the Bay Area and want to have an illicit affair, just go to the Wharf and you and your partner will never run into anybody you know. Now I’m not endorsing that particularly, nor is that particularly true, but the fact is that many of us who live around here and many of you who come to visit, too, think of Fisherman’s Wharf as a to-be-avoided tourist trap. We think we know the neighborhood, but really don’t; if you watch the story, you’ll find that the historic legacy of the Wharf is being kept alive in a variety of ways by some delightful and hard-working people. You’ll discover, as I did, that if you walk a few feet off the beaten path you’ll leave the crowds behind and begin to find the heart and soul of the place. I loved my day seeing my own backyard in an unexpected and brand new way.

– Carl Bidleman

Doug and I are TV guys who started working in this web world over two years ago and I’m amazed at how much of my life I now spend in front of a computer. 10-11 hours a day, six days a week. It seems way out of whack and I got to wondering how others who make their living in the virtual world get reconnected to the real one. So today we’re launching a new video blog series we call Life Outside the Box. In the coming days and weeks we’ll post conversations with Rhett Butler of Mongabay.com, David Allen Ibsen of 5 Blogs Before Lunch, Mindy Roberts of The Mommy Blog, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and Natalie Zee Drieu of craftzine.com about places where they love to spend their precious time. But we’re very pleased to inaugurate the series with a guy we’ve come to like very much, David Pescovitz. David is an editor of Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs on the internet that bills itself “a directory of wonderful things.” The editors report on internet esoterica, anomalies, and curiosities across an insanely wide range of topics, from innovative technology and contemporary art to culture and weird science. The only filter is “interestingness.” And interestingness is exactly what David shared with Doug at one of his favorite off-line places, the Musee Mecanique on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, home of the legendary Laughing Sal. Have a look.

– Doug McConnell

This was a wonderful morning for some of us OpenRoaders. Carl Bidleman, Jim Wirth and I did our first shoot along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco for a new blog series we’re calling “Life Outside the Box.” Being new guys to the web world, we find ourselves spending long hours in front of the computer screen filling the box with content. I still get to be out wandering around quite a bit, but Carl especially ends up feeling as if he’s living inside the box and not getting outside as much as he wants. He thought others in the blogosphere might be feeling the same way, and wondered what they do and where they go when they can escape for a while back into first life.

Click to play

Havin’ a laugh with David Pescovitz.

So we asked David Pescovitz, one of the terrific talkers of BoingBoing, if he would show us one of his favorite haunts in the Bay Area. David said he was game and we met at 10:00 a.m. at the fabled and fantastic treasure trove of old games and amusements, Musee Mechanique. We paid homage to Laughing Sal, watched a few arcade executions, challenged each other to a game of pong (the years have taken a toll on my reflexes,) and encouraged the Musee’s proprietor and old friend, Dan Zelinsky, to pound out a little Scott Joplin on the old piano in his workshop, right next to the power lathe and shelves filled with arcane parts of all kinds. David even snapped a photo of Dan’s metal pocket protector. Check it out on BoingBoing, visit the Musee Mechanique online and in person, and stay tuned for our video version of this story. Carl’s already back in the box editing the piece.

From the Musee we wandered down the block to the Aquarium of the Bay next to Pier 39. I wanted to show David the skate, sharks, sturgeon, and other critters. (more…)