Last week my friend Danny Wilms Floet came to visit me in Vancouver to do a road trip from here to California. I have known Danny for 35 years, we were schoolmates in primary school and he is currently living in Shanghai – coincidentally in the same street as where I used to live until March 2013.

We left on Sunday morning without any real preparations. The idea was to first drive through Washington state to Portland, Oregon, and spend the first night there before driving down the Oregon coast. But while driving out of my driveway I met my neighbour who told us that if we wanted to follow the coast we should not go down as far as Portland and try to spend the first night in Cannon Beach. We looked it up on my car’s GPS and that seemed indeed a better destination for the first day.

The weather was nice so we drove top down for most of the way, even on the interstate. Danny knows a lot more about contemporary music than I do, so he created some playlists in Spotify to play during the ride, which was really cool. We mixed that with some Sirius XM satellite radio stations (classical, jazz, 70s, 80s, and current hits) and even some occasional Dutch pop songs from the 80s that we both had not heard for years.

We arrived at Cannon Beach exactly during sunset, and we had a great view of the sun going down in the Pacific. I then checked the Hotel Tonight app for hotel rooms, but it turned out that Cannon Beach was fully booked. But the app showed us some other hotels with availability in Seaside, which was just a 10 minute drive away. We checked the best price online and then went to the hotel and asked for their best price. That was lower than the online price so we booked 2 rooms, put our luggage in the rooms and went out for a seafood dinner and drinks. We ended up in the only bar in Seaside that was open after 11 pm and had a memorable first evening. Not too many details here, but it involved almost getting into a fight with a completely drunk and very aggressive lady and a slight hangover because someone gave us whiskey shots while we were drinking IPAs after lots of local wine.

The next morning I needed some coffee and a walk on the beach to wake up, and we did not hit the road before 10:30 AM. That didn’t matter because we had no fixed plan. Or actually, we had no plan at all. My idea had been to drive along the Oregon and California coast to Napa Valley or so, but when my GPS showed us that that was something like 1100 km we changed our mind (I first double checked with Google Maps, in my mind it could not be more than 600 km or so – I was wrong!).

So we decided to take it easy and drive until sunset and then find a place to stay. The drive along the Oregon coast was amazing, much better than I could have imagined. The weather started off quite good, but halfway the coast it became more cloudy. That actually added to the experience, but it also got much cooler so we closed the roof of the car. Around 7 pm we were close to the Oregon and California border and we decided to take a hotel room in a little town called Brookings. Every single bar and restaurant in that place seemed to close down by 9 pm, so we had an early night (or better, I worked on emails and RSS feeds until midnight in my room).

The next morning we started with a run along the coast. Just north of Brookings we found a fantastic wild beach that was perfect for a run. After the run we showered, got some coffee and topped up our energy levels with a donut before we took off for the next leg of our trip through Northern Calfornia. The first part was still along the coast and we visited some nice little towns (my favorite was Trinidad, CA, where I would have stayed for a night if we would have had more time). The second part was through the redwood forests, which was quite spectacular as well.

We ended up in the town of Healdsburg in Sonoma, where we found a hotel and then went for dinner at a nice French restaurant. We had some good wines and great food and then started looking for a nice bar. Healdsburg is a very nice town and great for boutique shopping, but it’s not the best place to party.

The first wine bar that we found only had French wines, so we did not even go inside (if you’re in the middle of one of the best wine areas in the US I find it a bit arrogant to not have any good local wines on the menu). The next one seemed to be much better and we shared a great bottle. Unfortunately after about 30 minutes we were the only guests that were left and the staff started cleaning the bar… So by 11 pm we were back in the hotel again.

Wednesday morning we had a quick breakfast in the hotel (bagels & coffee) and then drove to the Kendall-Jackson winery. Kendall-Jackson is one of my favorite Californian wine brands, and it’s the brand I drink most when I open a bottle during the week or at dinner (mainly Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon). We arrived around 11 AM and started with their Garden Tour, a wine tasting in their gardens and vineyard. We among others tasted some of the Chardonnay grapes that would be harvested that night (!) and of course drank their Chardonnay with that.

After tasting several different wines in the gardens we ended with a dessert wine on the terrace. Because it was lunchtime we decided to have lunch there as well and ended up with a wine pairing lunch. The food was quite amazing, this was very high end cooking, something I had not expected at a winery. The combination with the wines was perfect and we had a great meal at Kendall-Jackson.

After tasting so many wines it’s not advisable to start driving right away, so we made a walk through the vineyards, had a coffee and bought some souvenirs before hitting the road again. We first drove to Tiburon with its nice views over the bay to San Francisco and then drove over the Golden Gate Bridge along Highway 1 to Half Moon Bay. I guess we could have stayed in the Ritz-Carlton there (one of my favorite hotels in the world because of its location and great atmosphere), but we had made a reservation in Mountain View already so we continued on for another hour. At night we had a great sushi and sake dinner followed by a bottle of Napa valley wine in a local bar, where we arrived just in time for the last order at 10 pm… We finished the night with a pale ale in the hotel room.

Despite all the alcohol we both woke up relatively refreshed the next morning and decided to start with a run around the Stanford Dish Loop. I have written about this loop before on my blog, it’s still one of my favorite places to run in Silicon Valley. After a shower we packed our bags and had breakfast. Then we did a bit of corporate sightseeing, among others at Google HQ where we drove the Google bikes around the campu, and at the Apple HQ where we stocked up on supplies in the Corporate Store.

After those visits we decided to go back into nature and so we drove to the hills (among others Montebello Road above Cupertino with great views over the Valley) and explored the backroads through the vineyards. The original plan had been to drive to Los Angeles, but we eventually decided not to spend an additional 2 days in the car and just have a relaxed afternoon. We ended up at the Inn at Saratoga, a nice hotel where I had stayed before.

We had a fun evening in town with a swordfish dinner and some beers in the local bar, where people were singing karaoke, which reminded both of us of Shanghai. We did not stay too late because we decided to drive back to Canada the next day, which we indeed did. We now took the interstate (mainly I-5) which took us in about 17 hours from Saratoga to Vancouver, including several stops for lunch, dinner, and of course filling up the tank at gas stations. Luckily no speeding tickets (as far as I know)! Even this road was quite spectacular, especially the part in northern California and southern Oregon. I was happy to be home though, 17 hours is actually just too long to spend in a vehicle in one day (even with 2 drivers in a fast car with several stops).

Looking back this was probably the best road trip I ever did. The feeling of total freedom, not knowing where you will end up each day, beautiful sceneries along most of the road, great conversations and discussions with a good friend for days in a row, a nice convertible, lots of good music, and great wines almost every day. It really can’t get much better in my opinion. I will have great memories of this epic trip for a long time to come!

More pictures from the trip in this set on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chijs/sets/72157647978334645/

I was just booking a room in the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco for an upcoming conference. When I filled in all details and my credit card number (unfortunately no bitcoin payments yet for Starwood hotels…) I was asked whether I was interested in a $5 coupon per day for food & beverage if I would opt out of housekeeping services.

I had never seen this before and was surprised to get such a question. The Westin is not a cheap hotel, so I can’t imagine anybody taking the offer to get $5 back (rooms start at over $300/night even if you book well in advance). I did a quick Google search and it seems to be a standard thing for Starwood hotels when you book through their website (which I normally don’t do), and instead of $5 you can also get SGP points that apparently are more valuable.

The official reason Starwood Hotels offers this is that you can ‘Make A Green Choice’, but on FlyerTalk it was described as a marketing ploy to get more people to sign up for the Starwood program. If it’s really about making a green choice they should give you the option to hang a ‘no housekeeping services required’ sign on the door without offering a financial reward. Whatever the reason, I like a clean room with fresh towels after a long day of meetings (isn’t that the reason people stay at decent hotels?), so I kindly declined their offer.

Yesterday I finally got access to my Circle.com Bitcoin account, after I signed up for it 3 months ago during the announcement at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam. My first impression: Circle is the most user-friendly and safest Bitcoin wallet (wallet = similar to a bank account) that’s currently on the market, but it’s not perfect yet. Because Circle is so easy to use and no real Bitcoin knowledge is needed it could help lead to more widespread Bitcoin adoption.

Setting up your account 

If you have ever used online banking you’ll be able to use Circle.com as well, the site is very basic without any bells and whistles, and leads you through the process of setting up an account in 2 minutes. You don’t need to understand much about Bitcoin and your coins are supposed to be safe because they are all insured.

After setting up your account (just an email username and a password), you are asked to give Circle your mobile number so they can send you a text message to verify it. From that moment on Circle will keep on sending you text messages with a verification code each time you want to log in or you want to transfer money. This is called 2-factor authentication and many other sites use it (I use it for many other applications to make them more secure, incl. for example Gmail), and it’s a good thing that Circle forces everybody to use it.

Account balance in BTC and USD

Once you are in your account you will see your account balance. I was happy to see that Circle sent me $10 worth of Bitcoin already, which is great for people who are new to cryptocurrencies and don’t own any BTC yet. The interesting thing is that the value of your BTC is prominently displayed in USD. This may confuse some customers at first because your account balance is fixed in BTC, but changes constantly in USD when the rate changes (overnight my USD balance went up to $10.35 because the BTC price went up).

Buying BTC

Buying BTC is a big problem for most people that I have introduced to Bitcoin over the past year, but Circle changes that. You don’t need to set up an account at an exchange anymore, but you just link your credit card or bank account to the website and transfer money to your Circle account. I connected one of my credit cards and that was literally done in 30 seconds. I could immediately transfer money from my card to the account.

Changing BTC from your circle account to USD is just as easy, you can just send it from your account to your credit card or bank account. Of course credit cards may charge fees for that, but bank transfers should be free. One downside is that only US bank accounts can be used for now, so international customers can only use credit cards to easily get money out.

Sending BTC

Sending money is even more easy, either you send money to another Bitcoin address like in every other wallet or you can send money to the receiver’s email if he or she also has a Circle account. That’s a major thing in my opinion, because most people at first are afraid to type in (or copy) a long string of characters when they send money to someone. But typing in an email address is something everybody does all the time, so using it transfer money is a much lower hurdle.

Issues with Circle

I am very impressed with the simplicity and functionality of the site. However, there are a couple of downsides that I need to mention here. First of all, for Bitcoin power users like me it’s not acceptable that I do not have my private key. This is similar to Mt. Gox where Mark Karpeles or a hacker was able to run away with most of the funds because the site held the private keys. Of course Circle solved this by insuring the funds, but I would still be reluctant to put larger sums on the site. But I believe that for most people not having to worry about a private key or storing Bitcoins offline is actually a good thing, because this is the same experience as putting money in a bank account, where you have to trust the bank to keep your money safe.

Circle creates a new Bitcoin address for you each time you want to receive money and this is confusing to consumers. People are used to having just one bank account that never changes. I emailed their support last night to ask what happens with used addresses and it turns out that they will always stay yours. So your ‘bank account number’ does not change, but you end up with many ‘bank account numbers’ that consolidate in your account balance. Probably a good solution, but because it’s initially confusing they should make it clear on the site how this works. By the way, their support responded very fast and gave a clear answer, this is very important for such service that depends on trust.

Another problem I have is hat Circle does not have a mobile app yet. They tell you to use their mobile site, but this is not very secure when you also receive your 2-factor authentication codes there. But worse is that if you want to pay with Bitcoin in a coffeeshop you can’t just scan a QR code and then press pay on your screen, but you’ll need to manually type in the full address. That makes using Circle virtually worthless to me when paying with Bitcoin in daily life. I assume this is something they’ll work on, because without it nobody will pay small amounts with Circle (or maybe that’s their aim right now?).

Conclusion: this comes close to BTC’s killer app

Generally I think Circle developed a fantastic product for new users. At Bitcoin conferences I have said a few times that I am waiting for the Bitcoin killer app to appear and I think this app comes very close. Circle is so simple to use that it could lead to mainstream Bitcoin adoption. If you’re interested in Bitcoin you should sign up for a Circle account and experience yourself how easy to use it is. Too bad I am not an investor in this company: they raised $26 million already and are probably values at $100-200 million right now, which is a bit out of my league.

Scott and Elaine like to collect lost golf balls and the best place to find them is in a creek next to the golf course. Most people decide to tee of with a driver, but their skills are generally not as good as they think, so many balls end up in the woods and very often the ball rolls into a creek that runs through there.

This afternoon I joined Scott and my parents for a walk along the creek to hunt for lost golf balls. We immediately spotted a few, but some where hard to get out of the stream. I even had to wade into the cold water to collect some of the balls.

Within 20 minutes we found 15 golf balls, despite the fact that we already found at least 5 yesterday as well. After that we walked down to the beach where we spotted another one in the water at least 200 meters from the fairway.

While Scott was building a dam in the creek on the beach he found another one. That ball must have floated down the creek when there was more water in it, I don’t think I ever found golf balls before on that beach. So a total of 17 balls during a short walk, which is probably a new record. At home the kids now have a collection of hundreds of golf balls, there might be a small business in there for Scott and Elaine!