A Walk Along the Bayshore

Gentle reader, the South end of the San Francisco Bay is an unusual environment. Here you'll find dykes built a century or so ago, which were used to create salt drying pools, and are now habitat for all sorts of wetland wildfowl. Last Saturday we took a walk along the edge of the Bay, roughly from the Googleplex up in Mountain View, down to my office in Sunnyvale.

Down here, it's very much a tale of two halves, with the area to the East of 101 (the motorway which runs up and down the length of the peninsula, mostly hugging the Bay, but further inland as you go South) being where the towns and residences are. To the West of 101 are the glass and concrete tech campuses, home to Google, Facebook, and any number of other companies, plus some historical relics which I'll come to later. This complete lack of housing or shops means those areas are essentially deserted at the weekends.

We started out up in Mountain View, taking in views of the Bay and the various lagoons formed by the dykes:

Before long we reach Moffett Field, the huge former military airstrip which separates Mountain View and Sunnyvale here. It's a fascinating place, home to three huge hangars built for airships in the 30s and 40s, including one which is one of the largest freestanding structures in the world. Not only that, but it's leased by my employer. It's difficult to comprehend the scale of these buildings, as you can't get that close to them, but this is a big, big space.

Finally we reach Sunnyvale, and even there, there are signs of how fickle and changeable the tech industry is:

Remember these folks?

In fact the whole area is a set of recycled buildings, with new tech titans constantly replacing those that failed before them: the Googleplex was the headquarters of the once mighty Silicon Graphics, while Facebook inhabits the previous home of the even more mighty Sun Microsystems, both of whom now seem to be barely-remembered footnotes in the history of computing. This is an industry in which, somewhat bizarrely, large companies have not yet learned to evolve (with the possible exception of those folks down at Apple, but I digress).

It was at this point that Helen noticed she'd somehow lost her Clipper card (the local equivalent of the Oyster card). Ooops! We now know how to report a lost card and get a replacement...

6 months after applying for it, Helen's had a response to her application for the EAD form, required to work over here. And the response is: your photos aren't good enough, please have another go. I can only imagine the US equivalent of civil servants taking the photos out daily, squinting at them, getting other opinions, then failing to decide and putting them back in the drawer; it must have been a really tough decision if it took 6 months to work it out. Anyway, we'll try again!