For locals, by locals, 71Miles covers weekend destinations within a four-hour radius of San Francisco. Our premier guides include the Northern- and Central-California Coast, Wine Country, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Weekly posts focus on specific travel ideas, such as hideaway-hotels for sex, downhill-skiing Tahoe, and best Bay Area beaches for open-fire grilling. Scroll down the navigation bar on the left side of the main page to find them all.

The sole writer-editor for the site is John A. Vlahides, who regrets he hasn’t more time to update. But lately he’s on big adventures, traveling the globe to shoot a new international TV series. More on that as it develops. See you on the road!

John A. Vlahides – Co-founder and Editor A native New Yorker, John lives in San Francisco, where he writes about travel in California and the west. He is a former luxury-hotel concierge and member of the prestigious Les Clefs d’Or, the Paris-based union of the world’s elite concierges. He speaks French fluently and holds a degree in classic French cooking from La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine in Paris, where he worked as an interpreter and studied with the same chefs who trained Julia Child.

John’s work has been published by Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Condé Nast, Sunset, San Francisco, Out Traveler, Genre Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, Miami Herald, and the New York Times. On television, he formerly co-produced a quick-vacations travel segment, called “One Night Stands with John Vlahides,” on San Francisco’s KRON 4 News Weekend. He has appeared as a travel expert on CNN Live Today, ABC7’s View from the Bay, as well as on various international and local radio programs, including Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ABC Overnights and the Bay Area’s KFOG Morning Show.

When not talking travel, John sings tenor with the Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Symphony Chorus, one of the few full-season symphony choruses in America. He spends his free time downhill-skiing and hiking the Sierra, touring the West Coast by motorcycle, and sunning on the beach beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

Email John

See clips of John’s TV appearances

Follow John on Twitter

Adam Rugel - 71Miles Founder
Adam moved out to San Francisco with AOL Travel in 1998, where he managed AOL products with partners like Travelocity, WorldRes, Travel + Leisure magazine, and Six Flags. In 2002, Adam left AOL and co-founded Serotonin Productions, a video-production company specializing in travel videos and interactive projects like Bargain Travel Minute, Hostel Days, and Meet Your Match Online. Most recently, Adam was Director of Business Development for two Bay Area startups: first Audiofeast, then Odeo.

Email Adam or call 323-632-6115 for inquiries about business development.

Adam Weller - Lead Developer and Co-Founder
Adam has been working in data-driven web design and development since 1998; for the last seven years, with a global web-hosting provider in system operations, development, and QA. He works in Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and C#, as well as database design and programming in Sybase, MYSQL, Oracle and MSSQL.