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.

California Trip - Day 3

Riding a Segway has long been on my bucket list. I have always thought the machine is an incredibly cool invention, even though it’s expensive and hasn’t really taken the world by storm as the company had hoped. My son has also wanted to ride one, ever since we saw them at Disney World when he was 11 years old. Sadly, you had to be 12 or older to ride at the time, so he was out of luck. Now he’s 16 so when I noticed an ad for Segway tours through Golden Gate Park, I jumped at the chance!

The tour from the Electric Tour Company consisted of a 45 minute training and practice session where everyone learned to ride the Segways. The remainder of the 2 1/2 hours was spent touring the park. Learning to ride the machine was an experience, a little scary but ultimately fairly intuitive. My son picked it up quickly as well and we both had a blast tooling around the paved, and sometimes unpaved trails. The Segway moves effortlessly up and down hills with a surprising amount of control! It will even “push back” on you when you approach the programmed speed limit, which in our case was 10 MPH. Riding one of these “personal transport devices” is a highly recommended experience to try, look around in your area for tours or rentals.

After the tour and an impromptu lunch of hot dogs, we drove to the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped at the visitor center. Actually, the place was packed so we had to park down the road a bit and walk back to the start of the bridge. This is a very popular tourist attraction and there were many people walking and riding bikes over the bridge. We decided to walk to the mid point, taking pictures along the way. The bridge is an incredible feat of human design and ingenuity which has to be experienced by foot rather than a quick drive over. The weather was sunny and nice but obviously windy on the bridge and very noisy due to the traffic. The scenes of San Francisco Bay are fantastic from the middle, or any point along the 1.7 mile long bridge.

Next stop was Fisherman’s Wharf. This place must be busy year round. We walked all around taking in the sights, sounds and aromas of the various restaurants and shops. One interesting place we stumbled upon was Musée Mécanique. This is a museum filled with a private collection of antique coin operated games and musical machines. It was fascinating to see all the different types of machines from the turn of the twentieth century through the late 1990s, most of them still working!

By this time we were both thinking about dinner. We went back out and walked down Jefferson Street looking for an interesting place to eat. We finally decided on Cioppino's which had a lot of delicious sounding Italian dishes on their menu. I was very surprised to find New England Style clam chowder (chowdah) on the list! Being 3000 miles away from New England I was skeptical, but it was very good. After dinner we skipped dessert to walk down to Ghirardelli Square to get some renowned Ghirardelli chocolate. We bought a variety of their famous chocolate squares in a tin box to bring back home. They rewarded us with a free caramel square sampler! Perfect. That wrapped up the day and we headed back to the hotel to crash.