First thing in the morning, we headed to Cupertino, home of Apple:
Apple got to create and name its own road, Infinite Loop. We became very familiar with this loop as it is nearly impossible to park there. We got our only parking related notification of the trip, fortunately, not a ticket, but more like a strong suggestion that was in no way enforceable as it was from Apple themselves, not the police:
We normally do park well and correctly, but parking at Apple is ridiculous. Dozens of people were parked in fire lines or had even parked other cars in. We didn’t do anything so bad as that. We just parked in a non-spot right in front of the new on-site Apple store, which is the only part the public is allowed in. They were all very jolly, but told us they could not legally tell us what it was like to work for Apple.
Check out the video:
We went on to Steve Jobs´ boyhood home in nearby Los Altos, which include the garage where the Apple 1 was built. It is in such a weirdly normal neighborhood. It is actually still a private home, but it has been preserved in the state it was in at the time legally, much like many homes in England are made to look like they did at the time they were built:
We carried on to the Googleplex in Mountain View. We were actually able to park normally and fairly easily there. Google was a bit more open in that they have a fair amount of outdoor space. Their staff were still very tight lipped though, so we don’t have any footage speaking to anyone from Google:
The one thing they do have that is actually for the tourists is the statues of the various versions of the Android operating system:
They also have Google bikes, which they have awkwardly named gbikes:
We may have had a go on them:
We also went to see where Steve Jobs lived as an adult billionaire. We met his security guard, who was a very nice guy. He told us loads of tourists come here, since people (I assume his family) still lives in the house, they need security to make sure people aren’t sticking selfie sticks above the fence. He said it was a *very* expensive area. The plot across the road had sold for 14 million dollars, even though the houses were only maybe twice as big as the one I grew up in and with not a lot more outside space:
After that, we headed toward the coast again as my long term German ESL student’s lovely wife Cirsten just happened to be in California at the same time we were. We spent the night in Half Moon Bay, another surprisingly expensive place (the most expensive hotel of the tour up to this point), which had obviously been very rural up until recently:
Apparently their specialty is pumpkins, millions and millions of pumpkins: 
They do have a beach, and though it was quite cold, it was very pretty: 
We got yet another Chinese as it was the only thing in the area that was mildly affordable.