What happens when you bring together a sommelier, a crepe maker, a portrait artist, and the vibrant characters that represent San Francisco? A Vayable night full of conversation, laughter, and ideas. The Vayable secret holiday party last week in our home base of San Francisco was an incredible gathering of travelers, guides, and friends.

With the holidays about us, it’s a good time to celebrate the gifts within us all that help to make this world so vibrant and full of character. Our community is the soul of Vayable, and everyone is a co-creator in this journey to bring about a more personal world where passion for cities, cultures, and discovery are celebrated. The Vayable experience was brought to life within the walls of Terroir, a beautiful wine bar in the SOMA district of San Francisco.

It was lovely getting to know you all over vino, and we will see you for many more gatherings to come. As we pack up and head home or stay with our loved ones where we are, we hope that all of you have a lovely holiday season full of great memories and experiences.

Happy Holidays! See more photos and tag yourselves here.

Last night we had a wonderful event at 111 Minna! Over two hundred people showed up, and we were really delightfully surprised about the great turnout! We love seeing people from our community connecting and mingling with one another!

The event featured Milton Aparicio, our amazing and inspiring guide who lives in a homeless shelter and works tirelessly every day trying to improve the lives of other homeless people. He gave a great talk about realities of homelessness and what we can do to improve the situation. You can check out his walking tour of the Tenderloin here!

Thanks to everyone for taking some time out of their evening to come support us! We’d especially like to thank the people who most graciously and generously made this possible: 111 Minna for letting us use their venue, ZeroCater for donating the delicious food, and Hospitality House and Glide for providing amazing services for the homeless.

Last night, we had an amazing event at Galería de la Raza featuring our Scout for Street Art tour guide, Russell Howze. Set in the middle of tons of beautiful and colorful murals, there was a gorgeous indoor graffiti exhibit as well as other pieces featuring diverse artists. Our amazing guides as well as members of our community came out to mix, mingle, and meet one another!

Russell gave an inspiring talk about how street art came to be popular and his ideas for how the city should support instead of criminalize visually compelling street art. He even signed a copy of his book for Jareau, who we share office space with! Everyone shared their wish list for San Francisco experiences, which we (unintentionally) made vague. Some hilarious things on there were “more dirt,” “more trees,” “no cars,” “repeal Sit-Lie,” and “free Muni.” We might not be able to make those happen, but we are working hard to discover amazing new experiences every day!

We were so excited to meet some of our great guides including Rob the tye die connoisseur, Jamie the street food expert, Topher the used bookworm, and the Tim the biker! Here are some pictures from last night’s bunch of some of the most vibrant individuals in the Bay Area!

We had a BLAST with all the amazing folks who came out to our community marketplace party in SOMA, San Francisco last night! We were deeply inspired by all the sharing, caring, drinking and dancing that took place.

It was certainly a night full of surprises.

We had guest appearances by a fortune teller, fire dancer and a belly dancer. Other hightlights included delicious waffles sponsored by our friends at Airbnb, beers delivered on romote control trucks, provided by our carpooling comrades at Zimride, a hook-up tent pitched by our buddies at SnapGoods and a Tesla smack in the middle of the dance floor, provided by our friends at Getaround.

The best part of the night? Hanging with awesome Vayable guides, Evan, Gabe and Rob (who came with kickass homemade Vayable sweatshirts-thanks, Rob!!)

Enjoy a video of the lovely people from Vayable and Airbnb going nuts in the Airbnb bouncy house.

…and the Getaround Tesla arriving in style.

A special thanks to our fellow community marketplace friends for helping us host a memorable night!

Airbnb.com (Accommodations), BranchOut.com (Career Networking), Crave.com (Collectibles), Crowdflower.com (Labor-on-Demand), Getaround.com (Car Sharing), SocialCam.com (Video sharing), Loosecubes.com (Offices), MindSnacks.com (Educational Apps), NeighborGoods (stuff), RentCycle.com (Rentals), Snapgoods.com (Gear & Gadgets),Taskrabbit.com (Jobs & Tasks), ThredUp.com (Kids Clothes), Thumbtack.com (Local Service), Vayable.com (Experiences), Zimride.com (Ride Sharing)