Wisetrips Travel Blog

At the end of 2015, I would like to take an inventory of things I consider to be the best in their class: Restaurants:  Mama's Fish House , Maui, Hawaii  Manresa , Los Gatos  The Plumed Horse , Saratoga  Solbar , Calistoga  Weinstube Baldreit, Baden-Baden, Germany  Plachutta, Vienna, Austria  Humuhumunukunuku'apua , Maui Hawaii …

After purchasing my 2013 Honda CRF250R off-road motorcycle (and having it repaired), I finally found some time today to ride it at the nearby Metcalf Motorcycle Park. This was my first time at Metcalf and on my new-to-me dirt bike. My past motorcycles were street-oriented, so this was a bit different. (outside my comfort zone). This Honda has a kickstart and no electric …

The first Star Wars movie I saw was " Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back " in the early 1980s in Shillington, Pennsylvania. This occurred before VCRs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, and Netflix existed. Back then, the only way to see a movie was to see it playing in the movie theater. That is until I discovered that my local Radio Shack had a laser disk player (these played large, LP-sized disks), and one da…

After the Potted Potter show, we had dinner at a nearby restaurant. However, finding parking was a struggle, and I drove round and round. Eventually, we settled on  Chubby Noodle  at 2205 Lombard Street - a quirky little place that serves exciting dishes. We ordered a " Spicy Garlic Fried Chicken " entree, " Korean Pork Tacos ," a " Duck Wrap ," and a " Green Papaya Salad ."…

Today, we went to see the performance of Potted Potter at San Francisco's Fine Art Museum. Potted Potter is a parody by Daniel Clarkson (Dan) and Jefferson Turner (Jeff), taking on the ultimate challenge of condensing all seven Harry Potter books (and a real-life game of Quidditch) into seventy amusing minutes. Dan and Jeff try to cover one Harry Potter book in ten minutes. Jeff plays Harry …

Back to Maui! Having scheduled a very early 7:20 a.m. departure from San Jose (SJC) airport (bound for Kahului, Maui, we woke up groggy at 4:30 a.m. We decided to try using Uber  to avoid parking at the airport, and I had a driver at my house in 10 minutes! We arrived at the terminal by 5:30 a.m. and had plenty of time to check in. I liked using Uber, as it avoided the costly airport parking fees. Our Hawai…