Sendero Group Travel Blog

Follow Sendero travelers on their adventures using accessible GPS.

Sunday, October 06, 2013

Using a Combination of Tools to Navigate a Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco

I used a combination of the BrailleNote PK with GPS and the Seeing Eye GPS as I navigated my way to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco this weekend. This was not trivial task as 250,000 other music lovers descended on Golden Gate Park.

First, I had to figure out the proximity of two places we could park and then walk. One was a mile North of the park and the other 0.6 miles South of the park.

Once there, I wanted to know where in the park we should head. We could hear the music before we even started walking but there were 6 stages over about a mile of the park.

This is where the Foursquare points in the Seeing Eye GPS app came in handy. The actual stage names were marked like the Banjo Stage, the Porch Stage, etc. I could easily find out which one was closest and head for it.

I did update the PK database with the stages I visited so I’ll have that next year.

sea of bikes, Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate park, San Francisco

When it was time to leave, I used the transit databases on the PK to find out where the nearest bus stop was located. I chose Fulton Street and caught the bus into town to link up with the Civic Center BART. The bus didn’t drop me very close to BART so I used the PK to navigate the final walk to BART. The fun thing was that there was a gaggle of young women on my bus also headed for Bart and they were all scrambling to use their phones to find it. In the end, they just followed me, which made me a little nervous in case I made a wrong turn.

I then took BART to Amtrak and then walked home from there, a lot of navigating for one day.

posted by Sendero Group # 7:02 AM

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