Tag Archives: Linna Freeman

San Francisco Trip, January 2012

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Linna and I got lucky this weekend in San Francisco with the weather and had a chance to soak up some sun for a couple of days. This was a short trip down South for a little shopping and of course some wining and dining. We flew late afternoon on Thursday and both of us were upgraded to First Class on Alaska Airlines; no dinner was served, but we did munch down the cheese plate with a couple of glasses of wine. Since we flew into Oakland due to lower cost flights, I booked our hotel in Concord, which was ½ hour East of Oakland. On our way to the hotel, we decided to have dinner at this Italian restaurant that I found on OpenTable during our flight from Seattle using the airline internet GOGO. Ottavio www.ottavio.com, is a local favorite in Walnut Greek and the place is so cozy…the Chef would come out to check on you.

Friday was pretty much a shopping day in San Francisco followed by dinner at a hip Japanese restaurant in Oakland. Ozumo www.ozumo.com is a lively young cool place serving authentic Japanese dishes along with premium sashimi. I would recommend using the valet, parking in the area was a challenge. Saturday was sleep in day followed by a visit to the Golden Gate bridge. Of all the visits to the Bay area, I have never actually walked on the bridge; actually you get more of a sense of the size, age and discoloration of the bridge. We flew out late Saturday afternoon to make it home to see a little snow in Seattle.

Costa Rica Trip, November 2011

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Linna and I decided to spend our Thanksgiving away from the wet skies of Seattle and spend it somewhere warm and sunny. We flew on turkey day to spend four days in beautiful Costa Rica. A good friend of ours, Mike Curry gave us a ride to the airport; surprisingly there were no lines at the airport. From drop off, baggage check in and through security….it was maybe 10 minutes! The flight from Seattle to Atlanta was 4 ½ hours and only 3 ½ hours from Atlanta to San Jose, Costa Rica. Linna found our hotel through Groupon, Asclepios….a wellness and healing retreat www.asclepioscr.com. This place only has 12 rooms, so it’s not your typical large International hotel. Our hotel guide took us to our room, well there was already a guest inside….a huge 4 inch spider on wall overlooking the bed. After contemplating we asked for another room, but it was smaller and on ground level. We put our brave hat on and asked for our original room back, the spider was still hanging on the wall.

The next morning was beautiful, started off with a small breakfast followed by a spa treatment at the hotel. After a relaxing massage, we took a taxi into San Jose for some exploring. Asclepios is a great hotel, it’s the location we had a problem with, it’s outside the city. This hotel had no bar, coffee, meat or Wi-Fi….plus there was nothing around this hotel. It was the reason we took off in the morning and came back late at night. On the other hand, if it wasn’t for the Groupon hotel deal, we would have never consider vacationing in Costa Rica. We hit a local spot in San Jose for lunch and for dinner we walked to Café Mando http://bit.ly/tNdkEG. This is a popular dinner spot with the locals and tourists too. Even though San Jose is the largest city in Costa Rico, there really isn’t much to see compared to other capital cities.

Next day after breakfast we picked up a Hertz rental car; this is the only way to really explore a city or country. It wasn’t your typical American or European rental car, it was a beat up, rough riding Japanese Daihatsu 4 wheel drive with bald tires. We headed off to the Doka Coffee plantation for a full tour, this was very informative and enjoyable; I would definitely recommend a coffee tour in Costa Rica. Our coffee guide stated that 60% of their coffee beans are exported to Starbucks….which I thought was pretty cool. Our next tourist event was the La Paz Waterfall Gardens, at $35 per person it was a spendy tourist attraction. It turned out that Linna and I had a very entertaining time and you could easily spend 4 hours there. For dinner, we found this Tex Mex restaurant Jalapeno’s that was featured in Frommers located in Alajuela, a few miles from our hotel. The owner Norman Flores was cool and friendly, he was born in Columbia and grew up in New York.

We got up early the next day and took off early to see the Volcano Posa. If you don’t get to the top by morning, the afternoon clouds roll in and ruin any chance for a beautiful view. So….we did our job and got up early and made it to the volcano park entrance at 7:30 a.m., but the park doesn’t open up until 8:00 a.m. We had some time to kill and on the way up the windy road I noticed a place to have some breakfast. Turns out this was a very small charming hotel www.poaslodge.com, Posa Restaurant & Lodge ran by two brothers, Mark & Oliver. It was almost like being in a rustic cabin and they served up a lovely breakfast. Now only a few miles away, we headed back up to the entrance gate and it wasn’t looking good, it was damn cloudy. So, it didn’t matter how early we were….the clouds were waiting for us anyway. What’s cool about the entrance at the Volcano Park, if there isn’t a view due to the clouds, the park service people will tell you not to waste your money and not buy an entrance fee.

Now that we wasn’t exploring the crater or volcano, we had time to drive to the coast. This only took 1 ½ hours from the middle of the country to Jaco, a pacific coastal city. After Jaco, we headed to Puerto Quepos to visit the Manuel Antonio National Park, this was all hype and no glory. After the hot, humid coast, we started driving back to our hotel. I wanted to hit some back country roads and drive through some small villages, but….the road I chose ended up to be a non-paved and very potted road. Ended up turning around and going back the way we came. We didn’t know but, everybody is driving back to San Jose on Sunday from the coast, so it added another hour to our drive. I look forward to coming back, but…with so many more countries to visit who knows if I will ever be back.

Georgia Trip, November 2011

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Linna and I flew down to Atlanta to visit AJ Hudgins and Colleen Favinger, old friends of mine that moved to Hartwell, Georgia about six months ago. I use to work with AJ and Colleen back in Cozad, Nebraska at Tenneco Automotive in the eighties. This was only a three day trip, but…the drive from Atlanta to Hartwell was warm with beautiful fall colors.

We arrived Friday afternoon and later had dinner at a local Mexican restaurant. After dinner AJ and I stayed up late getting caught up on gossip, life, and work. Linna and I slept in on Saturday and eventually woke up to AJ’s homemade breakfast. For dinner, AJ wanted to check out a new restaurant that was being featured in the “Food & Wine” magazine, “Five and Ten” located in Athens Georgia. Before we headed to Athens, we drove around Hartwell, AJ and Colleen’s new home for many years to come. It’s a quaint little town, but…bigger than Cozad, Nebraska where we all lived for many years. We stopped in at a local art gallery; you never know when you might find a piece of art that you might like. The owner and artist, Diane Geiger moved from Atlanta a few years ago to open her own studio “Hang it up Gallery and Studios”. I bought a small piece from Diane that I knew would be managable to travel back to Seattle with. It’s a small world, Diane’s sister lives in Bellevue, just a few miles from Linna and I.

After exploring Hartwell, we took the back highways to Athens. As we were getting close to our destination, we noticed it was college game day for the Georgia Bulldogs; our restaurant “five and ten” was walking distance from the stadium. After locating the restuarant, we decided to cruise the campus area which happened to be an eye opener. I haven’t been to a campus before that allowed open containers on campus, not only on campus…but walking on the street, sidewalks and all over. The campus reminded me of the movie “Animal House” with all the empty containers all over. After the campus fun, we headed to our dinner spot www.fiveandten.com, it was definitely a five star dinner. We got stuck in the football traffic after dinner, which was a total drag. Sunday was another sleep in, but eventually got on the road back to Atlanta after lunch; we wanted to stop at the Aquarium, but our departure was to close. It was a great to see AJ and Colleen again.

Denmark Trip, September 2011

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Linna and I wanted to visit a new country in Europe and we chose the Denmark area. We flew into Amsterdam and started our adventure in our rental car. We actually had no set plans on where we were going or where we were staying, in fact…we booked our first night hotel after we landed. Even though I didn’t sleep at all on the flight, I decided to drive to Bremen, Germany for our first day and night stay. By the time we checked in and showered up, it was dinner around 9:30 p.m. Our hotel was located in a very cool area near the river, the buildings and churches were glowing with the flood lights on them.

Next day we were headed to Esbjerg to see the “Man Meets the Sea” and then wanted to drive Northeast to end up at Aarhus for the night. About 1/2 hour out of Bremen, we got stuck in heavy traffic and delayed our schedule quite a bit, so we just headed to Aarhus for the night. I rented a Opel Sigma , not a bad car, but it takes awhile to get up to left lane cruising speed; I eventually got the Opel up to 145 mph. I got passed by a 7 Series BMW today in a no speed limit zone, but….I eventually passed him later in a restricted speed zone; he was abiding the law and I wasn’t. With a population of more than 300,000, Aarhus is Denmark’s second largest city and was founded by the Vikings in the 8th century. We took off walking after breakfast and headed for “Old City”, but…..along the way we noticed a cool circular walkway on top of a building. So we headed over and found out it was the ARoS Museum. The “Your Rainbow Panorama” was just added this year which was super entertaining. After a three hours of enjoyment, we headed to the “Old City”….this was actually pretty cool to see.

Now on our third day, we headed toward Copenhagen, it was actually our main destination for this trip. It was a three hour drive over from Aarhus and a $65 bridge toll! One thing we found out about Denmark….it’s damn expensive and it could be one of the most expensive cities in the world. We arrived to our hotel “First” and got checked in around 6:30 p.m., the plan was to take a nap and get up around 9:00 p.m. and head out for dinner….well, we slept through and woke up at 3:00 a.m. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I got up and worked on my emails and my blog until our 6:30 a.m. breakfast time. After breakfast was tourist activities, shopping on the famous Stroget street, we checked out Castle and the Winding Tower. The next day we checked out Carlsberg Beer and the Church of our Saviour, the famous corkscrew spiral staircase that ends at the very top. This church was completed in 1695 and is known for its baroque architecture.

After our three days in Copenhagen, we took off after breakfast back to Germany. To shorten our route, we decided to take a 45 minute ferry ride ($104) from Rodbyhavn into Germany and then we drove into Bremen (again) for the night. Bremen was only a resting stop for the night, after breakfast we headed toward Amsterdam for our last night.

We took country roads to Amsterdam, which is my favorite way of driving anywhere in the world; you gain a sense of the local culture and you get a quite peaceful ride with beautiful scenery. We got to our hotel room around 7:00 p.m. and we decided to take a nap before we headed to the Red Light district downtown Amsterdam. By the time we got up and got going into the sin city it was 11:30 p.m. Parking is always tough, it took me a good 15 minutes to find parking…we ended up walking 10 minutes into the heart of the Red Light District. On the way in, we walked by so many “coffee shops”, the sweet marijuana smell was permeating the night air. This was Linna’s first time seeing “woman for sale” standing in the windows and all the live sex shows in the area; we did some window shopping and had a few drinks. We got home about 3:30 a.m., the same day as Linna’s flight back to Seattle.

Linna headed back to Seattle and I flew later to East Midlands, United Kingdom for some work in the UK, France and Belgium with my co-worker Greg Tebb. He lives in Lincoln, UK….a very quaint city, it’s dates back to the 1700’s. I stayed at the Washington Borough Hall http://www.washingboroughhall.com a 300 year old mansion Bed & Breakfast in Lincoln, it was probably the best B&B I have ever stayed in.

Seattle, Live Painting, August 2011

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My wife Linna and I had the distinct pleasure of hosting a live painting in our back garden area by artist Sayoko Hirano from Kyoto, Japan. She was visiting Seattle and New York with other artists, Bosshiko, Gan-Ghan and Chiaki. I met Sayoko through an Japanese Art Auction on Facebook.

My friend Allan Leal was posting the artist website on his Facebook page and I thought it was the least I could do was to purchase a piece of art; all the donations were for the Japanese disaster relief campaign that generated from the tsunami devastation. The piece of art I bought “lovers” is placed above our Buddha in the landing with a beautiful frame around it. I befriended Sayoko on Facebook and found out that she was going to be in Seattle for a few days before she went on to New York for her own art exhibit. So I asked if her group would be up for a barbeque and fire-pit party at my house, her reply was “yes, could we do live a painting?”, and of course I am like “oh hell yes!”

Linna and I invited twenty-five guests over to enjoy the festivities in our backyard garden, we had it catered by Duos Catering www.duoscatering.com, which I highly recommend. Even though we started the fun around 6:00 p.m., the live art didn’t happen until 9:00 p.m. which actually gave the event more drama with the spot light on the live 30 minute drawing.

After the drawing, Gan-Ghan provided a story telling event with prizes; he spoke in Japanese…but with his facial and body expressions you could still follow the story. Chiaki performed a 5 minute dance that incorporated hip-hop and martial arts. This was a perfect evening and to top it off, Sayoko Hirano gave me her live painting!

San Francisco Trip, July 2011

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It has been a while since I have been to San Francisco and after spending a three day weekend….it was a good reminder why I love this city. Linna and I flew Alaska Airlines down to Oakland airport which is just a 20 minute hop over to San Francisco. We stayed at the Hilton hotel in the Union district; this area is close to highend shopping and walking distance to plenty of sightseeing. We had dinner the first night at Jardiniere’s restaurant, this is a neighborhood hotspot and the dinner reviews were spot on, the place excelled.

Next day we met up with a friend at the Butterfly located in Embarcadero, this was more of a business casual dining….but, I would definitley hit this spot again if I come back to this area again. That night I had a craving for Italian food, so I picked Palio d’ Asti which was a little more than a mile from our hotel. I wanted to walk so we could do a little shopping along the way. After living in Seattle for 15 years, the shopping is a little stale and every shop seems to offer the same things. Palio d’ Asti dishes were delicious, but the service was a little weird….our server would never look at you when he spoke. After dinner we hit a Chinese massage place to relax our feet after a long day of walking. The foot massage was okay, but….I would be looking for something better next time in San Francisco.

The last day was more shopping and we finished the day off at Scala’s Bistro in the heart of some major shopping. I ended up with a couple of cool shoes and three new jeans and Linna ended up with three full bags of expensive apparel. Our flight was delayed from Oakland to Seattle, so I wrote this blog up during three cold Stella’s.

Nebraska Trip, April 2011

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I haven’t been back to my hometown (Cozad, Nebraska) since my class reunion in September 2009.  The main purpose was to spend Easter with my sister Nova Walker, she was diagnosed with cancer 6 months ago.  Linna and I flew direct from Seattle to Denver on Alaska Airlines, just a little over 2 hours.  Cozad is located on Interstate 80 halfway between Denver and Omaha; taking a direct flight from Seattle is much easier than flying into Omaha with a connection and still driving 4 hours.  The Eastern side of Colorado is not much to look at and all it does is encourages you to drive as fast as you can through it.  Speed limit is 75 and I usually drive 85 to 95 to make sure I get to Cozad for dinner…..well this time I had Mr. State Trooper stop me to say hi. 

After we settled in with my good friend AJ Hudgins and his girlfriend of 27 years, Colleen Favinger in Cozad we headed out to Bella Italia for dinner.  There isn’t much in Cozad, but I have to admit I am totally impressed with this Italian restaurant located in my small hometown.  After dinner, AJ and I sat up until 4 a.m. gossiping about the 4,000 residents in Cozad.  The next two days AJ and I spent driving around Cozad seeing old friends and neighbors.  We stopped in to visit with Mark McKeone, Scott Diehl, Eric Seaman, Marty Munster, Verna Story, Ardi Wilcher, Heidi Bazata, John Dorsey, Scott Hergenrader, Sherry Armagost and even dropped off a dozen tulips to Ardi Wilcher.

Linna and I spent Easter Sunday with my sisters Nova and Alicia and their families.  We started the day off with church service at the Nazarene; I haven’t been to a church service for 9 years or so…..and it might be another 9 before I go back.  After church we drove over to Gothenburg, ten miles west of Cozad for brunch at Walker’s Steakhouse.  After munching down the Midwest buffet, we headed back to Nova’s house for pictures and an Easter egg hunt for the kids. 

Most all small towns in the Midwest, especially Nebraska….the towns are pretty much closed down on Sundays….which means there is no place to dine.  The nearest town for a decent dinner on a Sunday is Kearney, a college town 50 miles East of Cozad.  We first stopped at Hunan’s, a Chinese restaurant that Linna rejected after taking one look at the menu.  After another late night, we got up Monday morning and headed back to Denver.  I took a small detour to Sidney, Nebraska and stopped in at Cabelas to pick up a new shotgun case for my over/under Browning Citori 12 guage shotgun that I was flying back to Seattle with me.

Turtlehead Peak Hike, March 2011

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Turtlehead Peak
Date: March 27, 2011
Difficulty: 6 out of 10
Distance: 5 miles roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 2,000 ft.
Time: 2 to 3 hours
Location: 20 Minutes From Las Vegas
Users Group: Hikers Only
Permits: $7.00 Park Fee
Trail Conditions: Dry
Hiking with: Linna Freeman

Linna and I had some extra time in Las Vegas during the day and a sunny hike was in order.  I did a quick search for hikes near Las Vegas and Turtlehead Peak had the most elevation gain with a 360 view on top.  This hike is located in the Red Rock Canyon area with numerous other hikes located along the one-way 12 mile route that loops through the canyon.   The trailhead parking was overflowing with cars so we had to park along the road, which I suppose is normal during a weekend. 

We got started on the gravel trail with the sun beaming down overhead.  The trail starts off fairly easy on a river bed and soon picking up some elevation.  Once you get to the gully, it;s a scramble until you get to the ridge.  Once on the ridge, pretty much just follow a couple of trails to the summit.  The 360 view on top was worth the steep scramble in the gully.  Las Vegas was off to the East and the surrounding mountains were glowing red from the sun.

Las Vegas & Zion Park, March 2011

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Linna and I was due for some sunny skies and warmer weather; Seattle was getting dumped on this month and it had been cooler than normal.  I was already down in the Vegas area for work, so Linna joined up with me on Thursday.  After picking her up at the airport, we did a little shopping before heading to St. George, Utah.  We wanted to explore Zion National Park in Utah and St. George was only one hour away from the park.  St. George in the first city you come to when traveling north on I-15 from Vegas.  After checking in at the hotel, we heading off to the local attractions and we couldn’t miss the Dinosaur Tracking Museum.  This site is described by many paleontologists as “one of the ten best dinosaur track sites in the world” and is one of the most important discoveries in early Jurassic paleontological history.  To finish our day off, we headed off to Snow Canyon State Park, this is a quick 30 minute drive through the park, but….filled with beautiful Red Mountains.  While a few miles away are the White Hills, and eroded sandstone rocks of both colors make up the cliffs at either side of the valley.

The next day was exploring Zion National Park, just another beautiful day of mountains.  It started off cloudy and just got worse and soon it was down pouring.  We wanted to hike Angels Landing, but cloudy weather just got worse and soon it was down pouring.  Even though we had our rain gear with us, we wanted a sunny day for a pleasant hike and great pictures.  About the  time we pulled in the trailhead parking lot, it stopped raining…..cool.  After a great day hiking and playing in Zion for the day, we headed back to St. George for the night.  I have an old friend, James Jorgesen that I haven’t seen for 25 years from my hometown that was living in St. George, so we met up for some beers and chat.

The next day was a bust, we headed off to Bryce Canyon, but all we hit was snowy roads and mountains.  We actually drove all the way Bryce Canyon Park entrance and almost paid the  $25 fee, but…my better judgment said no.  From there, we drove all the way  back to Las Vegas.

Angels Landing, March 2011

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Angels Landing
Date: March 25, 2011
Difficulty: 5 out of 10
Distance: 5 miles roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 3,838 ft.
Time: 2 to 3 hours
Location: Zion National Park, Utah
Users Group: Hikers Only
Permits: $25.00 Park Fee, Valid (1) Week
Trail Conditions: Wet
Hiking with: Linna Freeman

Linna and I was due for some sunny skies and warmer weather; Seattle was getting dumped on this month and it has been cooler than normal.  I was already down in the Vegas area for work, so Linna joined up with me on Thursday.