In the meantime I have become the second longest non-permanent resident here in the US (that works for my company). Two people have left and two new people have arrived. That means that we had a lot of welcome and goodbye lunches, brunches and BBQs. Between of all the celebration and commiseration I did not find time until now to write my second update for all the poor souls that had to remain on the old continent =)
Cycling
You might wonder where the title picture was taken. I took it at the destination of an extended cycling tour. It has been a long time since I drove a bicycle longer than 30 minutes in a row. But as you can see in the picture below we have quite nice bikes here in Redwood City. It would be a shame to not use them at least once for a little bike adventure.
To get to the “Water Temple” you see in the pictures we had to ride up quite a steep hill. This was no walk in the park, both figuratively and literally! I don’t remember/know exactly why this “temple” was built but it has something to do with the water reservoir nearby. As there was not much more to see than this temple we were back on the bikes not long after having arrived.
The ride back down was a joy and the omelettes at the end a fitting ending for an adventurous morning.
Drive’n’Walk
Half Moon Bay
Last Saturday we made another small excursion. I heard a lot about Half Moon Bay and how beautiful it can be when it is sunny and I always thought that it is a beach. As it turns out, it is a small town which has a bay and a beach. The town is located at the pacific coast, whereas Redwood City borders the waterfront of the San Francisco Bay. RWC is thus a little bit protected from the Pacific weather. It’s astonishing how different the weather can be when you go up to San Francisco or over the hill to Half Moon Bay. We left a blue sky behind in RWC and drove into cloudy weather on the other side of the hill.
Beach
While there were some (crazy) people that fooled around in the water, it doesn’t seems to be a bathing beach. There is a lot of ugly-sea-plant-things lying around and the water is quite cold. But who knows, maybe that will become better the older the summer gets?
Anyways, we walked around the beach in Half Moon Bay. Even to a place where – according to a sign – there are deadly waves at any time or – according to Google – there is the best surf spot around. But the weather that day was too calm to offer any of those two things.
Devil’s Slide Bunker
Back to our car, we drove some miles northwards and stopped again to walk some meters to the Devil’s Slide Bunker. I don’t really get why the “attraction” has 4.7/5 stars. The view is nice, but nothing really special compared to multiple other spots along the coast.
Pedro’s Point
Back at the car we drove again some miles northwards and left the car behind once again for the first walk that can be called a hike on the trip so far. We intended to walk to Pedro’s Point but cut our hike short as we saw how much potential energy we would have to waste and build up again on the final stretch (and again on the way back). We decided that we are quite happy with seeing Pedro’s Point from afar rather than from a little bit closer.
On the way back to our car we walked through a small forest that looked a lot like I would imagine a jungle would look like.
At the next stop with our car we did not walk far. Only to the shoreline and then to a bar to enjoy some refreshments. Instead of going further north, we decided to head back and prepare ourselves physically and mentally for some nice dinner in Redwood City.
Random Exploring
I did some mention-worthy exploring in the Silicon Valley that doesn’t deserve it’s own heading with size 2, so I put some of them with a heading with size 3 together under this size-2 header.
Apple Headquarter
As you might know I rather enjoy working with Apple products. Thus, it was a must-do for me to visit Apple’s headquarter in the Silicon Valley. They even have a Visitor Center for all the other fanboys and me. If you have enough money to waste you can buy – apart from common Apple hardware – some exclusive Apple merchandise.
You can go on top of the Visitor Center and look at the headquarter in real-life. The big circular building is huge. But you can’t get close to it. The circumference is a mile, the diameter is about 500m and it cost around 4 billion dollars. In the second picture below you see a small part of it. On the first floor (US first floor, means ground level for the rest of the world) they have a model of the building that can be enhanced with astonishingly beautiful AR with the help of an iPad.
Winchester Mansion
Tripadvisor recommended me the Winchester Mansion. Unfortunately, the wife of the inventor of the Winchester rifle became early in her life a widow. Afterwards, she began to adding rooms to her standard farm house and never stopped adding. The house now has over 160 rooms and they offer tours showing all the crazy designs and layouts that were constructed by her and her workers. The carpenters and other workers even lived on the estate, as they were never finished with the work and just built and built and built.
Tour through the mansion
I didn’t take that much photos on the inside because there weren’t a lot of big highlights that I felt needed to be photographed. Instead, there were a lot of small interesting details. All-in-all, Tripadvisor did a good job advising me to visit this house.
On the second part of the tour a family joined that is very well described by the picture I took and inserted below. The wife makes a ton of pictures, the kids are running around and asking a lot of questions and the father seems to handle all of them very well =)
On my way back to Redwood City I stopped at the Bay waterfront with dirty Bay water that didn’t make the cut but the dock leading up to it did.
Stanford University
On my previous trip to California I briefly visited the Stanford University. Then, we most probably had been parking illegally because the parking was scarce and did not walk around much. However, right now there is summer break, there are almost no students around. Additionally, the University is only a 15min drive away from Redwood City. I decided to go there once more.
Campus Size
This place is huge. I don’t know if the students have to study in these buildings in the middle of the campus as well. If yes, you would need to have a bicycle to navigate around the campus. Walking would definitely take too much time. It must be some kind of competition on how much space at a location where the land prices are high someone can waste to show the power and wealth a university has. I prefer the Swiss/European way with taller buildings and shorter, more efficient ways between buildings and rooms. They even announced that ETH Zürich doesn’t want the Formula E on the campus because it goes against their plans to build a more condense campus in the future.
Car wash
On the way back I had trouble seeing out of the front window because the sun reflected in the dirt. I even chose the best-rated self-car-wash in town for that. Having done that, I’ll wash the car the next time in an automated car wash.
Some Schmankerl of American Lifestyle
By now you might have seen microwave popcorn. But what if you want to eat the popcorn out of a bowl and not the bag you took it out of the microwave? And you don’t want to clean a bowl afterwards because you made it dirty? Well, I found the solution for your problems in a “Whole foods”: Microwave popcorn that pops up already in a bowl! What a time to be alive =)
That’s it from me for now. Right now I have to find out where exactly the fireworks will go off tomorrow (4th of July) so that I do not look in the wrong direction.
