California!

by mo on 07/14/2008

This weekend, I made a brief journey to the west coast to visit joey. First time in the bay area, and it was pretty nice. On Thursday I arrived and visited Apple, Inc. and couldn’t take any pictures, but did have some tea.

Friday Joey had to work so I took the Caltrain over to Palo Alto, and spent the morning exploring Stanford. There were swarms of Japanese tourists everywhere, so I listened in, and went on a tour (in english). Being the seasoned college tourist (on both sides — tourist and guide) that I am, this tour left much to be desired. My tour guide was up to your standard tour-guide quality, but the tour itself was light on the concrete examples and heavy on the Stanford pride. I.e. she was very enthusiastic (just like every tour guide at every school) but I wanted to see a classroom, a dining hall, a library, a dorm, or at least go *into* a building besides the church. At least they did a good job showing off the fact that we were in sunny California by never going inside.

Palm Drive:

One of those college brochure kind of shots (+trashcan):

Hoover tower:

View from tower:

In Palo Alto I walked around, looked in stores, ate lunch, and came upon a substantial iPhone 2.0 line. I did not attempt to buy an iPhone, but I saw some successful shoppers up and down University Avenue.

The rest of Friday was spent going to San Francisco for dinner. We found a good place in chinatown and ordered way too much food. San Francisco was pretty great, and in general it was refreshing once again to come upon street corners where two different groups of people were speaking different languages that I didn’t understand. That situation is hard to come by in Colorado.

After dinner we visited a couple famous San Francisco places — Lombard St., Union Square:

And the Golden Gate Bridge, where it was extremely cold and windy, but there was a convenient rock on which to perch my camera:

Saturday morning we went to the Computer History Museum which had some pretty crazy stuff. The Babbage Difference Engine was extremely sweet, and looked extremely difficult to operate (not to mention how difficult it was to actually build, etc.)

The rest of Saturday was spent going first to Half Moon Bay, buying organic fruits on the way, and shopping at a really cute yarn store (acquired some good wool), and then heading down the coast on Highway 1 past Santa Cruz to find a beach. On the way we stopped at Pigeon Point Lighthouse:

We eventually found Sunset Beach, which was nice, relatively empty, or so it seemed at first.. until a giant army of birds showed up. First there was just one bird:

But that was merely the harbinger of the other million:

So, a more Hitchcockian sunset than anticipated…

So an excellent weekend in Pacific time, but I have now returned to Mountain.