This guy has seen some things at Gazebo. Trust me.
Feeling thankful to have Gazebo Gardens around. It’s pretty damn unique and borders on something necessary for a city.
I am not talking about the nursery/plant aspect of it either. I am talking about the third space feature for friend and family groups.
In case you don’t know, Thursday – Saturday evenings Gazebo Gardens nursery turns into a beer garden & food truck court. Complete with seating and some shade.
There are very few places you can meet up with people without having to reserve or hawk a big table, or worry if “all of your party is here yet”.
Just show up around a time. Eat, don’t eat. Drink beer, don’t drink. Kids can wander around. You can wander around. It’s great.
Sure, I get tired of it too, like any place. I am here to appreciate the looseness of it all, and there isn’t much of that out there.
Related: As I sat on Shields yesterday waiting for a train to pass, I caught a little bit of the blues coming from Gazebo
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:
Next time I’ll show you the stuff the tourist guides won’t
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.
The ISS with solar array in full bloom (pic by NASA just in case you thought I took this)
Sorry if this is yet another thing that makes me a nerd but I like spotting satellites in Fresno’s night sky. Even with our light pollution, its not that hard to do.
If ya think you have never seen one, you probably have and just passed it off as a plane.
The trick to spot them for me is: there are no blinking lights on a satellite.
It is one solid light that looks like a star, but moving smoothly and quietly across the night sky.
Blinking = Plane.
Solid = Satellite.
If you like watching a small dot move across a screen, here is a video I took of the International Space Station going over the Eastern Fresno sky:
And this equally dorky one across the NW Fresno sky:
I mean, come on now, THAT is some THRILLING ? video people! [sarcasm]
As nerds in Fresno take video of them that you can hardly see, the Space Station crew occasionally takes shots of the Earth below:
— International Space Station (@Space_Station) August 5, 2021
There are websites and apps to help spot things. I sometimes use an app simply called “Satellite Tracker” to find me some info on what I might be seeing – there is a lot of abandoned space junk up there still circling.
You can find a calendar of the ISS’s activities here.
Once you get the hang of it, it becomes pretty easy to spot the random ? satellite – there are many more than there used to be. It usually only takes a minute to find one and I live in the middle of the city.
Also, over the next few weeks the Perseid Metor Shower is going on, peaking August 11-13th. You definitely can catch a few from your patio but those are best viewed outside of the city.
I tend to nerd out more on the weather the older I get. Especially when it’s hot. I don’t understand the nerding, it’s just happening to me and you’re here to witness it.
I think it’s because the heat is part of Fresno’s personality. Just talking about hotness is boring on the surface, but when you dig deeper it’s kinda interesting. Like Fresno.
In this past few years of nerding-out about the Fresno heat, I have kept my eye on the various temps around the city.
Fresno doesn’t have just one temperature.
It is different throughout. It is rare when there is a same temperature in Fig Garden as there is in West Fresno. Or NE Fresno compared to Sunnyside.
I don’t know why. Either it is geographically setup to be hotter or the equipment at the airport taking the readings is calibrated badly, but the airport is consistently hotter.
The hottest area of Fresno, nearly EVERY day.
Sadly, this is where the definitive reading for Fresno is taken and then given out to the world. Fresno’s temperature of record is always its worst.
It’s bad marketing. This must be changed.
As an example, I have three different devices at my house (nerd alert!) that have outside temp readings. As I write this, two say it is 103, one says 104. The Fresno Airport reading is 108.
If you are in Chicago right now looking at temps around the country, Fresno would read 108 and not 104.
(I know, some of you don’t think there is a difference but there is and that’s not the point right now.)
It’s Baked Into Us As Fresnans
I get why Fresno would want to present itself to the world in the worst possible way. I hate myself too sometimes.
It’s secretly one of the things I love about this city; everyone sees us at our worst (heat & crime) and we’re like “Yeah? Fucking deal with it. If you can’t handle us at our worst than eat shit – or something like that.”
But maybe we can change this ONE thing? There could be days our high could read 98 instead of 102. Or 87 instead of 90. Sounds and feels better, yeah?
We don’t need to cheat either. Just take our official reading from a place in Fresno NOT the airport.
Scout an area that is the middle ground.
You can pick a City Of Fresno property. Like, a water-well site in an area of Fresno that consistently reads a lower-to-average example of Fresno’s temperature.
Kopi, I assume, giving it to you straight up
I mean is there some state law that says to pick the hottest area of town or something? Can’t Kopi step in here and tell Fresno to have a Great Day somewhere else?
Are you listening Weather Service in Hanford? Do you give a damn, City of Fresno?
With all the power invested in me as the City Blogger, I propose we use a different location for our temperature reading. The current one causes us too much heat.
People can shit on this and I get it, you shouldn’t brag about things not technically in your city, but hey man: it’s pretty fucking cool we can get to everything rad in California by lunch time.
Tahoe
Yosemite
San Diego
Your Mom’s
Monterey
Las Vegas (ok it’s Nevada, but still)
San Francisco
Disneyland
Shasta (a late lunch)
Russian River Brewery
ALL BY LUNCH!!
Zachary’s Deep Dish Pic by @restaurantgroupie on Instagram
I can go have a pizza at Zachary’s in Berkeley right now, FUCKING WATCH ME.
Then go have some beers at Faction and look at this view:
Then have some sucker drive my buzzed-ass back home for tacos in downtown Fresno, LIKE. A. KING!
Can Austin say that? Fucking Kansas City? Chicago? Atlanta? Boston? Pittsburgh? Either of the Portlands?
NO! They cant say these things! Cities don’t talk.
But if they could? Well, they would say “I wish I was where Fresno is.”
