Sneak Peek: Wed, Feb 7, 2024 (Patreon)

After a one-week hiatus, Wednesday videos are back! It wasn't really a hiatus for me -- I spent four days in St. Petersburg, FL and four in San Luis Obsipo, CA for speaking engagements...and doing lots of filming. The speaking events went fantastic, and I can't wait to do more. I met so many viewers, and I got to hang out with St. Pete's mayor (subscribed!), the CEO of St. Pete's transit agency (was already a huge fan!), and a Tampa city councilperson (also a fan, apparently?), and the vast majority of engineering and planning students I met in San Luis Obispo watch my stuff too, which is encouraging for the future. If I never felt like what I was doing was making any kind of impact before, I certainly did this past week. Pictured above -- the only time in my life I've ever been featured on a table tent.

Oh, and a little patron-only intel for any of you who were considering attending the event in Portland on April 9 -- it "sold out" (it's free) in a few hours, but the folks at PSU are currently scrambling to rebook at a larger venue, so stay tuned. I'll post here first when more tickets open up.

So today's video is my St. Pete city visit. There's a dynamic I realized happens on every single one of these trips where I intend to make a video about the city. I spend the first day or day and a half being a combination of overwhelmed ("there's so much to see and film!") and jaded ("this feels the same as every other city!"). And then, somewhere in the middle of my first full day out and about filming, things just start to click. I start seeing things I've never noticed in other cities, I start to make connections and understand (or at least theorize) WHY those things are the way they are, and a narrative starts to form. In St. Pete, I started out wondering how I'm going to get even 10 or 12 minutes of material....and I ended up with a 24-ish minute video which I had more fun making than just about any video I've done.

(Similar experience in SLO, where I also shot video. It definitely won't be 24 minutes, but I found a lot more to talk about than I expected, and that one will be coming in a couple weeks.)

So here's my question for you today. What's a city you've visited that you had no particular expectations of, that you only perceived as a generic, unremarkable city, but that ended up surprising and delighting you? (For me, it seems like that's every city, but I'm weird like that.)

Happy Wednesday!