Mesa Boogie Factory

Yesterday I took the bus up north to Petaluma, which is a beautiful little suburban town on the edge of Sonoma County. It’s about 2 hours from San Francisco. I really only had one reason to go, it’s where the world headquarters of Mesa Boogie are.

Firstly, Petaluma seriously needs to invest in more buses. One every hour is really not on! I walked about 5 miles yesterday and still beat the bus! Anyway, after getting into Petaluma and finding the Mesa factory after an hour and a half (!!) I went in and asked if they did tours. It’s quite a small little place, I’d imagined it to be some industrial park all to itself (Cisco Systems is there too, and that’s exactly what they have!) but it’s a reasonably small single story workshop down a tiny little road. The people in the office are super nice, they called down a customer service rep who gave me a full guided tour of the factory.

It’s amazing to think that they’re one of the only amplifier companies in the world that still manufacture everything in California – even Marshall have outsourced to China. The Mesa I have sitting in my room in Broughshane came from the exact workshop I was seeing. Everything is hand-made – even Randall Smith, the founder of the company, still works there and marks out every amps circuit board by hand. There obviously are machines that help with the process but it’s still mostly handmade. They even have one room where musicians come in and rock the amps up to ten to test the tone. The tour was pretty interesting, it wasn’t a very ‘professional’ tour like you’d imagine with most commercial companies – it’s more like some dude who works there showing you round on your first day. It’s really a nice little company. I also managed a sneak peak at some of their newer models, which I’ve never even seen in the UK.

So I got the obligatory pen and other merchandise which was a cool little souvenir to have. Again, the bus schedule showed no sign of helping me out on the way back so I walked back to the main bus stop back to San Francisco and got vastly sunburned in the process. I should point out that Petaluma is about 85Âº during the day.

Last night then I went out to the pub quiz at the Edinburgh Castle. It was a little crowded and hard to hear the questions, but it was good fun with people from the hostel. Then at about 11 o’clock I remembered I was moving to a different place to live. So I had to get back pretty quickly and get my stuff packed up. My new room is kinda cool. It’s shared between me and another guy, he’s from Tahoe. But it’s got a TV, fridge, microwave, internet, and private bathroom so I can finally unpack my stuff. At the moment it’s only for a month but I’m thinking that’s all the time I’ll need over here anyway. My gameplan at the moment is to stay here until the end of August then make a decision to stay or go. The thought of longterm doesn’t really appeal to me so far, but I’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

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