Visitations

Last week, humble reader, we had our first proper visitor here in Palo Alto. Our friend Karen Cherry came to visit us from the UK, giving us every opportunity to be proper tourists and take in the sites and sounds of the San Francisco Bay Area with fresh eyes. Unfortunately the weather was unseasonably cold - a couple of days of 4 or 5 degrees centigrade and rain - but otherwise we had a typically Californian time of things.

As I've mentioned before, Silicon Valley isn't really a valley; it's more-or-less the peninsula which runs from San Jose up to San Francisco. That sliver of land divides the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean, with the Eastern half the densely populated series of towns which we call Silicon Valley, and the Western half a sparsely populated coastal area. Separating those are a range of mountains, which are about the same height as Snowdon.

The day after Thanksgiving we walked along the top of that ridge of mountains. We managed to get some fantastic views before the rain came along.

In the mid-left here, you can just about see San Francisco, which is about 30 miles away.

We then drove down to the Ocean, on the other side of the hills, and the sun peeked out momentarily.

On Saturday we went up to San Francisco. The weather was cold and drizzly all day, and I have to admit, dear reader, I'm a lot more Californian than I was 6 months ago, and as a result I didn't prepare all that well in terms of attire. This would have been a miserable day in the UK, but here it was exceptionally so. Anyway, we managed to fit in a ride on the cable cars, which was, against my better judgment, amazing:

Sitting behind the folks driving these things and watching them go about their work was fascinating. The cable cars are dragged up the hill by a cable which is buried beneath the road surface, and is constantly moving. The cars themselves clamp on to that cable to be pulled uphill, and release it, relying on gravity, to go downhill. All this is happening while city traffic is winding left and right around the cars, and there's incredible skill shown by these folks in navigating the steep hills and drops, regulating their speed carefully amongst all that traffic, with such rudimentary control of the car. I really thought this would be some sort of awful tourist trap that I'd hate, and in some ways it is, but it's also hard work done to a high standard. I really enjoyed it.

I like to think that Karen enjoyed her trip. Anyway, she was good enough to fill out a TripAdvisor-style review for us, which should give a clue to what's on offer for any of our readership that would like to book some time with us here in Palo Alto.