Jan 27, 2022
In this podcast, Alex picks up where
he left off in Part
1, with his first trip to San Francisco.
He was with his dad and much older
sister when she was scouting colleges. They ended up staying with
family friends in Presidio Heights. He shares the stories of things
they did and saw while here in the 1990s.
Alex spent a lot of time in New York
City, where his sister wound up going to college. Later, he went
into hospitality school at Cornell in upstate New York. After that,
he dabbled in hotels in Detroit and Orlando before making the move
West, where'd been drawn so many years prior.
He arrived in San Francisco in 2008,
right as the bottom was coming out of the economy. But that wasn't
what brought Alex here. His route to The City went, oddly, through
Tokyo. The large Japanese metropolis told him that he could be
anywhere he truly wanted to be. To reconcile that with Alex's
belief that he needed to be around the right people, San Francisco
was only logical.
He got work up in Napa in the wine
industry pretty much right away, but only after a quick detour at
Burning Man. He already had a place to live here, too. He shares
his arrival story before we pivot to talking about Gillibus.
A friend was leaving SF to go back
to New York and wanted to buy a vintage school bus for his journey.
Alex went with him and was blown away by the beauty of the classic
vehicle. Before his buddy's move, he and some other friends took
the bus on epic road trips. His friend ended up leaving the bus in
The City and bailing for NYC.
Alex kept that bus and learned to
drive it. Soon, he was giving people rides and then it dawned on
him: rent the bus out to folks.
We end the podcast with Alex's
thoughts on what it means for him and for his bus company to still
be here.
If you missed Part
1, please go back and listen.
We recorded this podcast on Zoom in
January 2022. Photography by
Michelle
Kilfeather