my name is mwd

I’m just back from my trip to California, which was both a useful work trip and a first visit to the valley area of California. Work wise I was out there for a training course at Intel’s Santa Clara office along with a PhD student from the Computer Lab, Andrew West, and then various meetings dotted around the valley. Given I was dotting around the valley I braved hiring a car and faced both driving an automatic car for the first time and driving on the wrong side of the road, but despite my fears that turned out fine, and really helped with getting around as public transport in the valley kind of sucks.

We stayed in the Santa Clara Marriott which was a reasonable enough place. Particularly it had a gym and a pool which helped with my plan to try and minimise my time shift from UK time. I was getting up at 5 am CA time and goinf to the gym. I’d mistakenly thought I would be the only one in there, but other people seemed to like this idea and given they were American I can only assume they were people into the whole getting up early thing. By 6am it got so busy you had to wait for a machine, so at least there were some benefits to my 5 am start! Also, I can’t remember the last time I went swimming, but given I was in California it seemed essential that I make use of the outside swimming pool. My room looked out over the pool too, so the early part of the day post gym was spent checking my email with the balcony doors open whilst I munched on my starbucks breakfast - very civil :)

Driving everywhere I wanted to be work wise was very easy - it seems that just about everywhere we wanted to go was just off a freeway. The pace is a little different - not so fast as UK motorways but you definitely can’t be timid about changing lanes there or you’ll get nowhere. I think I only hit the right hand curb a couple of times during the trip (and I had to fight the reverse when driving back in the UK).

On the Saturday Adam took us up to see San Francisco (after stopping at the International House of Pancakes for breakfast). Santa Clara and the like are not exactly the most exciting places to live from what I saw - smallish places with lots of tech industry but not much in the way of stuff to do, but that’s made up for by San Francisco. We first went up to the Golden Gate Bridge, and the scenery around that area is really good (the pics linked below aren’t amazing but hopefully give you a good idea of what it’s live). The bridge is quite majestic in it’s setting. Post that we went to Alcatraz (as tourists note, nothing to do with any bad behaviour on our part ;), which is a 5 minute ferry ride into the bay from SF. It’s interesting to see - it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, only ever housing a few hundred inmates. The island also provides some amazing views of SF and the bay area.

Once back into the city we did two things I’d wanted to do for ages: visit an Apple Store (how sad ;) and go to the Stinking Rose, a garlic themed restaurant of which I heard good things from other friends that had visited the area. I love garlic, and so a garlic centric restaurant can only be a good thing in my mind. They even have garlic ice cream, which you simply have to try and the grounds of where else would you get it (and it tastes quite good too, though by that point I suspect my tastebuds were a little saturated I must admit :). Anyway, it was a good day out, and many thanks to Adam for acting as tour guide. One day isn’t enough in SF and I really need to go back there and explore more.

Sunday was a quieter day and we took it easy. We finally got lost looking for something, which thus far we’d failed to do. It took us about 90 minutes to find the large Fry’s on account of us going one set of traffic lights too far at an early stage, lengthening what should have been a 5 to 10 minute journey somewhat :) After that we went to Palo Alto on a whim for lunch - I think mainly I wanted to go becuase a) it’s a bit of a tech famous place and b) it’s where Microserfs by Douglas Coupland is mostly set. We found the university area (PA is home to Stanford University) which seemed a likely place to have nice cafes, and had a brief wander there. That bit of Palo Alto wasn’t at all like I’d expected, being nice and leafy and smaller scale that I’d thought. We also happened across (acidently I hasten to add) a second Apple Store, so I got myself more iPod accessories whilst there :)

All in all it was quite a good trip, with work stuff going well and getting to see an area I’ve always wanted to visit. I definitely think that, assuming you had a car to get about and head up to SF of a weekend, the valley isn’t that bad a place to be (sorry Huw, I know that’s not an opinion you’re likely to agree with :). I definitely look forward to returning at some point to look around more.

Link: http://homepage.mac.com/mdales/Pictures/PhotoAlbum26.html