The Bay area

Thursday, September 26, 2013



It was a quick and easy 50 minute drive to Berkley, home of the University of California at Berkley, or as UC-Berkley likes to call it, “the Harvard of the West”. The campus is large and as we were not able to find a street that goes through the campus we could only see into the edges. Cal-Berkley has 39,000 students and it appeared to us that none of them were in class. We never saw so many students in one place. What we could see of the campus looked very crowded, both with students and buildings close together. The campus is built right into the hills that overlook San Francisco and the bay. We found a road that took us up into the hills where we parked and had incredible views of San Francisco. Lynda happily got us lost coming back down the hill into downtown Berkley. We then wandered through Alameda, somewhere near Oakland, before driving on towards Palo Alto. Passing through Menlo Park, Lynda directed us to the campus of Google. The Google campus is the size of a small college. Think Hope or Albion. One building even had valet parking. We also drove through the campus of LinkedIn. There we saw a man walking between buildings with a shirt and pants with the same bright red, yellow, and orange tie-dyed pattern. Thursday must be tie-dye day at LinkedIn. In Palo Alto we visited the Stanford University campus. It too is a very large campus but is one of the few that rivals MSU in beauty. All the buildings were built with the same Spanish architecture.

After a late lunch we left Palo Alto and decided to drive a couple of hours to make for a shorter drive into Los Angeles tomorrow morning. We knew in Utah and Nevada we would have trouble finding a hotel but driving down I-5 in the middle of California? We ended up driving 4 hours. I-5 goes through the middle of the San Joaquin Valley which is like the vegetable garden for the entire country. We drove hours through fields of almond trees, lemon trees and assorted vegetables. Even after dark we could see the lights from farmers harvesting produce.

Friday, September 27, 2013



We had a very relaxing morning as today’s travel goal was to arrive at Lynda’s cousins house sometime in the middle of the afternoon. We will probably not post a blog for several days as the rest of the weekend will be spent relaxing, drinking margaritas, visiting with family, drinking margaritas, relaxing, etc. You get the picture. Enjoy your weekend.