GOOD's MacKenzie Fegan recently took a Ford Edge across the country to meet innovators in New York, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In San Francisco, she visited Josette Melchor, the executive director of the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, which supports technology-based art installations in downtown San Francisco, and Jeff Linnel, of Bot and Dolly, which has repurposed industrial robots to film commercials and movies.

GOOD's MacKenzie Fegan recently took a Ford Edge across the country to meet innovators in New York, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In Austin, she visited William Hundley, a photographer and artist working on a series of ephemeral sculptures, and Thomas Bercy, an architect at the forefront of the city's sustainable design movement.

Stella and I said our teary goodbyes today as the Edge of Progress tour ended. Good thing the Edge is equipped with automatic wipers.

I'd also like to take a moment to thank Roadside America and RoadFood.com, two websites that got us across the country seeing interesting things and eating delicious food. And, of course, thank you again to the new Ford Edge.

And this isn't quite goodbye. Videos of my talks with innovators in Austin and San Francisco are still on their way. Stay tuned for those in the next few weeks, and look back on the whole trip on the Edge of Progress site.
 

The last five days of the trip took us from Palm Springs to Los Angeles to San Francisco, unsuccessfully battling every claw machine along the way.

In the past 19 days, we covered 4,600 miles, four time zones, and 13 states, and we learned that if there's one thing that unifies the country, it's Chinese food. As a Chinese-American, I was tickled to find that every town, no matter how small or homogeneous, had at least one Chinese restaurant. Although I was curious to see what exactly passed for Chinese food in rural Arkansas, our whirlwind schedule kept us from sampling the local kung pao chickens and lo mein. Today's lunch in San Francisco (full disclosure: it was at Henry's Hunan Restaurant, owned by my family) was our the first taste of Chinese food in almost three weeks. Pictured above is, in my mind, the quintessential example of Chinese food in America. A concoction of Chinese-spiced ground pork and onions sandwiched between onion cake-like crusts, it was my grandmother's attempt to sandwichify Chinese food. It's neither Chinese nor American, but boy is it delicious.

We couldn't have asked for a better panorama for our last picture of the day.

For most Americans, working in factories was so 50 years ago. Today only 10 percent of the workforce is employed by the manufacturing sector, as compared to 34 percent in 1950. Some might see this as progress, especially since factory work is often associated with long hours, mind-numbing assembly line work, and windowless facilities.

But SFMade promotes manufacturing of a different kind, and it's on a crusade to bring those jobs back to San Francisco. Companies in the SFMade network see their workers as artisans, not cogs in a machine, and their craftsmanship can be seen in products ranging from small-batch chocolates to sturdy-yet-stylish messenger bags.

GOOD's MacKenzie Fegan recently took a Ford Edge across the country to meet innovators in New York, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Here she visits Josh Hadar, a designer who combines metalwork with solar cells, and Cathy Erway, a writer and rooftop gardener, to learn how they're repurposing traditional technologies for the 21st century.