California Trip - Final Day

The first time I visited San Jose was when I worked at IBM in Fishkill New York back in 1992. I was sent to a three week training course at a company named MegaTest. MegaTest has since been bought by Teradyne but I wanted to see if I could find the same building where the classes were held. I was able to determine the address of the building and it was still there, but I didn’t really recognize it since the trees were taller and the other vegetation was very different. It was still cool to find it. Lots of memories from spending all that time away from home and exploring the west coast.

Nearby is a Fry’s Electronics store which we visited just for the experience. If you read the reviews of customers you’ll see the same types of complaints that you’d see from Best Buy or the long defunct Circuit City. But, we weren’t going to buy anything, we just wanted to see the enormity of the store and its wide range of products. Inside the store it had a kind of Mayan decor which I couldn’t really figure out and I didn’t take the time to try. Our real plan for our last day was to visit the Lick Observatory which didn’t open until noon. We were just killing time.

After stopping at a Subway (our second transgression from unique bay area restaurants) to grab some sandwiches we started the hour plus drive to the mountain. Twisty does not begin to describe the road that leads up the mountain to the observatory. Many curves had no guardrails to prevent you from driving off to oblivion, but the Nissan Sentra handled itself well, even though the power steering was whining in protest after about 10 miles of constant left and right turns. I suspected inadequate cooling of the power steering fluid to handle the abuse we were giving it.

We arrived at the observatory at the summit of 4200 foot high Mt. Hamilton and had our lunch before going in. We were given a tour of the Great 36 inch Refractor telescope that was completed in January of 1888. The 36 inch lens was ground and polished in Boston! The fantastic observation room has a floor that raises and lowers to allow the telescope to be used from any angle including straight up. This is another incredible piece of engineering especially given that it’s 125 years old. We also saw the 3 meter reflector telescope that was completed relatively recently in 1960. Both of these telescopes have been used in major discoveries including several new moons of Jupiter and several extrasolar planets.

We wrapped up the visit at the observatory and headed back down the serpentine road to the base of the mountain and then back to San Jose. We got to the airport with plenty of time to have dinner and start the long flight back, first to Phoenix and then a red-eye back to Boston. It was another great trip together as were the first two and we are already thinking of Canada for next year. It is great to travel with my son and we hope to continue it for many years.

California Trip - Day 4

Day 4 arrived and we decided to do our “Technology Tour” in Silicon Valley. We were staying only about 15 minutes away from many giants in the technology space. First stop was Google headquarters (the Googleplex) in Mountain View. While we couldn’t go in, we did walk around the grounds which was very interesting. It definitely had the feel of a college campus which I suspect was deliberate. Obviously the company spans several building over multiple blocks. We walked over to the Android building where they have the famous statues representing the various versions of the Android mobile operating system.

Very close to the Googleplex was the Computer History Museum. We figured a tour of the museum would take a few hours but we ended up spending most of the day there! There were a huge number of exhibits of computing technology from the abacus to Google servers from 1999. The museum was arranged as a maze where you walked though history with twenty stations that focused on various stages of advancements in the field of computing. One of the highlights of the visit was the demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2. This is a fascinating machine designed by Charles Babbage who was never able to build it!

Next stop on the Technology Tour was the Apple Company Store at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. The interesting thing about this store is it has a variety of Apple themed products such as clothing, lunch bags, water bottles and other items that you can’t get anywhere else. They do have MacBooks, iPods, iPads, and iPhones on display, as well as accessories for these items, but fully half the store was devoted to the specialty items. We bought a water bottle, a coffee mug, and several tee shirts as souvenirs. The whole time we were in the store, there were large tour buses pulling up and dropping people off to visit the store! It was really amazing. And no, we didn’t happen to see any of the famous executives while we were there.

One place we did not get to visit was the Tesla factory in Fremont. I didn’t realize we were so close to the plant until we saw it just off the highway while driving north to San Francisco. They only offer tours to people who are buying a car and the showroom is only open by appointment. We are fortunate to have a Tesla store in Massachusetts at the Natick Collection. We did see many of the Tesla Model S cars while driving and it became somewhat of a game to spot them. They appeared to be more common than Corvettes in the bay area. I later read that Tesla is outselling other popular luxury brands in California, I’m not really surprised.

We cut the touring a little short after stopping at a Starbucks for Frappuccinos. Now, I’m definitely a Dunkin Donuts fan, but obviously I was out of luck in sunny California. Also, this was one of two transgressions from our self imposed rule of only eating at places we can not find back home. We drove back to the hotel and had leftovers from our dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf. Our last day here was coming up.