– Carl Bidleman

There are many wonderful aspects of living in the San Francisco Bay Area but for my money, the  greatest is it’s parks and open space.  (Tip:  Be sure to watch this video in HQ mode.)

I should explain why we’ve been AWOL from blogging for a while.  This economic storm has forced me to take a full-time job leaving only Saturdays and a few hours during the week to attend to OpenRoad.TV.  I’ve been fortunate to land at the George Lucas Educational Foundation working with and meeting great people and getting paid to make little movies (as George calls them) about what works in public education. I’m very grateful. If you know any educators or someone who cares about educating our kids, tell them to visit the site.  It’s good and it’s free.

Meanwhile, Doug hasn’t blogged because he’s busy producing a new OpenRoad series for Public Television with the help of our pals Dan Herz, M’Gee Johnston and Stefan Ruenzel.  We’ll be launching the series in the Bay Area on KQED this April and syndicating nationwide in the fall.  Kaiser Permanente and East Bay Regional Parks are our first sponsors and we’re HUGELY grateful to them and our investors for making this possible.  We are determined to stay alive until the economy improves and we can find enough advertising support to let us continue to travel the West and bring you intriguing tales of the people and places that make this one of the most fascinating regions in the world.

In the meantime, I’ll plan on putting up at least one story a week from our library of travels.  Don’t have the time and resources to bring you the full updated information, links, Google maps, etc. just now.  But I think the videos are too good to just leave sitting on a hard drive on the shelf.  So here we go.  Let us know what you think.

– Carl

– Jim Wirth

The San Francisco Bay Area has some of the most beautiful landscapes you’ll find anywhere in the world.  And what better way to experience the breathtaking scenery than to get out on your own two feet and hike!  You will have no problem finding great hiking trails just about anywhere around the San Francisco Bay, but if you would like some expert advice on where to go, you’ll want to check out Jane Huber’s website Bay Area Hiker. 

Jane’s website includes detailed information on close to 250 great trails that she has personally hiked herself.  Each hike has its own information page, which includes directions on how to get there, trailhead details, gas, food and lodging information, distance and difficulty, official rules for the trail, links to additional information about the area, and recommended maps and books.  If that wasn’t enough, Jane has taken the time to write a very detailed essay about each particular hike featured on her site, with lots of her own photographs.  One of my favorite features of the Bay Area Hiker website is the link from the home page to all hikes organized by difficulty. 

Jane has also written a book called 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: San Francisco, which is now in its second edition…

We’ve got many videos here at OpenRoad.TV of destinations included at Jane’s Bay Area Hiker website, so be sure to check out our content as well.  Now grab your hiking shoes and water bottle, and get out there to enjoy this wonderful place that many of us are lucky enough to call home.

Photo by Mike Disharoon

– Stefan Ruenzel

In 2004, Alder Yarrow typed the words “wine blog” into Google’s search engine and got zero results. A void to be filled, he thought. So Alder, wine lover, founded vinography.com and began to blog on the subject of wine. Red wine, white wine, cabernet, pinot, chardonnay, merlot, the perfect wine-to-dish match—all things wine have become an integral part of Alder’s life outside the box (where he is Founder and Principal of a design consulting firm).

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Fast-forward to 2008, type in “wine blog,” and you will find 941 thousand results. Vinography.com is first on what is now an interminable list. Call Alder the grandfather of wine blogging; he calls himself a “legitimate journalist” at the end of the day with a glass in hand and a laptop before him. Doug got the chance to catch up with Alder at Bin 38, a hopping wine bar in the Marina District of San Francisco, to discover his favorite places to wine out in the city.

Here’s a list of the places Alder mentioned:

Bin 38

CAV

Yield

Nectar Wine Lounge

California Wine Merchant

Vino Venue has closed its doors since we chatted with Alder.

– Doug McConnell

Our good friend, Jodie Chase, has brought to our attention an extraordinary new environmental art program headed for the San Francisco Bay Area. Get ready to see some amazing and massive works of art along our roadways, and if you’re between 12 and 18 years-of-age with a statement to make and a flair for the visual, start drawing. You can get involved right now.

ReVisions/SF is a project of the Eco-LogicalART Gallery in Los Angeles. Nine original works of art painted on recycled billboard vinyl will be displayed on billboards, 14′x48′ in size, where millions of us will see them as we motor by. Smaller works on vinyl will be on display at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability in the Presidio. It will all begin on Earth Day, April 22nd, and continue through May 21.

There’s also an open call to middle and high school students to send their works right away to “Gimme Shelter,” an Eco Art event. Submissions are sought for the heme: “The World as I See It/World as I Hope It Would Be.”

According to a press release Jodie passed along to us: “The project begins with an initial 11X17 inch vertical submission created in pencil, pastel, markers or paint, on paper or illustration board.” Please send or deliver your work along with all your contact information (name, address, email and phone number) to:

Thoreau Center (The Presidio)
Building 1014 (Lincoln Blvd and Torney Ave)
San Francisco, CA 94129
Attn: Bruce DeMartini
Gimme Shelter Art!

The public is invited to the opening of the gallery show at the Thoreau Center on April 22, 2008 from 5:00 to 8:00 PM.

Should be fun….and the results will be fascinating. But get moving. All submissions are due no later than this Friday at 5PM. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing the submissions and the perfect use of billboards to encourage us to pass a beautiful and sustainable world to coming generations.

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

Spending too much time in the office and at the computer was the very reason we started Life Outside the Box. And all too often, that problem persists. Last week, Doug and Stefan Ruenzel met up with Merlin Mann for an interview at San Francisco’s Stern Grove. Once again, I couldn’t get away from the office.  And it’s too bad because I was looking forward to meeting Merlin. He is the editor and main force behind 43 Folders, a family of websites about “stuff like personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better.” Stuff I really need to know. He is also That Phone Guy, a very funny rebirth of Bob Newhart’s “buttoned down mind.” I am a big fan of Merlin’s work and I hope to learn enough from 43 Folders that I’ll be able to get outside the box the next time he connects with OpenRoad.TV.

— Carl Bidleman

Doug and I have only met Om Malik twice but we’ve come to like him very much. Om is a highly-respected journalist and founder of Giga Omni Media which publishes a number of websites that chronicle the worlds of technology and new media (GigaOM, NewTeeVee, Web Worker Daily, Earth2Tech, Found/Read, GigaOM Jobs and GigaOM TV). We first interviewed Om for Life Outside the Box on December 21st, but before we could post the video, he suffered a heart attack. As you can imagine, Om’s life both inside and outside the box has changed dramatically. He’s now taking time to smell the flowers and we would all be wise to take the time to listen to what he’s learned.

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– Carl Bidleman

Natalie Zee Drieu is the Senior Editor of Craft magazine and spends way too much time online. But when Doug invited her to log off and come outside, she picked one of her favorite places to play…San Francisco’s beautifully rejuvenated waterfront near the historic Ferry Building…and brought her terminally cute dog, Lulu, along for the fun. Good choices. To watch the video, “click to play” beneath the photo.