Portland vs Fresno: Yeah, You Keep Showing Up For Weirdness, Portland

Fresno takes the win for this round. O

Only Portland has the time for something completely stupid as fuck.

Fresno is a little too busy with life to participate.

#KeepFresnoReal

There Are Weather Apps Out To Get Fresno?

 There Are Weather Apps Out To Get Fresno?
This is a screenshot from the weather app, Carrot.

Bro. I knew it wasn’t going to get to the 105 and 106 on Friday. This is what many weather models were showing.

You could tell by 9AM it wasn’t going to be that hot.

You see, experienced Fresnans know that the night before and the morning of, tell you everything about what the day is going to be like.

I worked outside most of the day and it was fine to me (humble brag). I am locked in for this Summer.

Anyway, really I am here to take this time to note that weather people are out to fuck Fresno.

All of them predict Fresno as being hotter than it really is. This is not an issue of the reading being taken at the wrong place (which it totally is), weather apps always error on the side of hotter.

Just like my favorite one, Carrot, they predict higher than it ends up being. All. The. Time.

So screw them all. I don’t know why they want to keep Fresno down, maybe they don’t even know they are doing it. But they do it.

Fresno As A ‘Basecamp’ For Stuff, Put To The Test

b6845aa5-9c3a-4bc7-a921-c1727bdeb113 Fresno As A ‘Basecamp’ For Stuff, Put To The Test
Downtown Fresno shots by Nick Pisano at the Road Goes On Forever

I have always said that Fresno is a great basecamp for visiting the Sierras, most notably our three nearby National Parks: Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Sequoia. But I had never really known of someone that actually did it – someone not from here anyway.

A dude named Nick Pisano is spending a year traveling (sounds like a sweet gig if you can get it) with his partner and recently spent a couple weeks using Fresno as a basecamp.

This long blog post by Nick documents his use of Fresno as a base for visiting our nearby parks and … Bakersfield ?‍♀️ -that is actually a cool part to me, but anyway.

It is a overall good blog post illustrating how a tourist can use Fresno as a basecamp, I want to make that clear. 

Buuuuut.

He gave us several shots throughout the post. He tried to be nice about it, but definitely didn’t pass up on chance to deal in digs:

“Not a lot going on here”

“I’ve gone out in search of Fresno, as it were, multiple times here and come up relatively empty each time.”

“relatively sleepy”

“The key to enjoying this city is lowering your expectations”

“a kinda bad city next to some very good things”

“I say this with the utmost respect, but there’s just not a terrible lot going on here. In some ways, it’s the least-happening place we’ve been.”

Woah. Pretty rough.

I will give him credit for going to a Fresno Grizzlies game, the Tower District, and bonus points for visiting the Underground Gardens. He seemed to enjoy those, as he should.

He certainly didn’t do all the things though.

In fact, one major mistake: He did not seem to have much (if any) Mexican food – most notably no mention of tacos:

Yep, you KNOW Mike Oz is taking that dude on the taco tour of his life next time.

Speaking of food, going out to eat is a feature for Fresnans. Part of our culture is eating out. When someone visits us, we plan on eating places. It is a “thing to do”. 

You can make fun of that if you like but I think it’s cool. It’s a Fresno feature that is underrated. 

Also, this guy seemed to not be familiar with the concept of a small city. A working class city. A city for living a life.

Not every town is built to give a shit about tourists. Fresno is one of them.

We don’t have a beach. We don’t have Disneyland. There are no longer any cable cars. A Hollywood sign doesn’t loom over the town. We don’t have a Vegas Strip. We have no plan for someone hanging out for two weeks.

What our “sleepy town” has is people working their ass off and living a life.