Getting the flavor of...Rewired San Francisco

Rewired San Francisco

A second technology wave has San Francisco “humming anew,” said Andrew Nelson in National Geographic Traveler. Locals use apps to find food trucks and track the city’s micro-climates, and the digital connectivity aids visitors too. Through Airbnb.com, a local success story, I found lodging in a private home that was as plush as a boutique hotel but less pricey. To get around, I used SideCar—an app that connected me to one of the city’s “citizen chauffeurs.” Tech jobs continue to remake the city: The formerly run-down Mid-Market neighborhood has acquired a sheen of hope since Twitter set up its headquarters there last summer. But more thrilling is the way that technology connects people. Soon after I checked in to my second Airbnb lodgings, my hosts invited me to a dinner party on Potrero Hill, where I was quickly folded into the crowd. The technology “turns travelers into party guests and party guests into friends.”

Massachusetts’s historic weather center

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A stormy day must be a fun time at the country’s oldest weather observatory, said Patricia Harris and David Lyon in The Boston Globe. Built in 1885, the Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Mass. (bluehill.org), sits on an isolated hill south of Boston that provides the area’s best long views to the Atlantic. Visitors hike a mile up Blue Hill to reach the modest, castle-like structure and are ushered into “a trophy room of Victorian-era scientific instruments,” many of which remain state-of-the-art today. “This is the cradle of meteorology,” our guide tells us. The observatory has an unbroken string of daily climate readings that no other facility can match. Upstairs, the longest continually used mercury barometer works alongside modern computers that track wind speeds. From the roof, on a clear day observers can see four states. We can’t see that far. “Foggy visibility is also exciting,” our guide assures us.