Mountain View is a part of the Silicon Valley a little less than an hour outside San Francisco. It’s home to NASA’s Ames laboratory, an Intel Campus, and our friend Pete who we’re staying with on this visit. We had a comfortable apartment to stay in that’s not loud at night. Consequently, we slept well all night and woke up late the next morning. I didn’t get out of bed until 7am this morning, and the girls were quiet until I opened the door to release them. I don’t know what time they woke up. I made oatmeal for breakfast.
We had no plans for rushing about today. All we wanted to do was relax. We did get our laundry done, put our dishes through the dishwasher, bought some small things from the store (some to re-stock Pete’s apartment since we used things up...including a wonderful San Francisco area only ice cream sandwich between 2 oatmeal cookies with the whole thing dipped in chocolate called It’s It. We haven’t found them in Oregon. Pete had some in the freezer, but since we ate some last night, we bought another box to replace it. Shhh. don’t tell him.), and the girls did their piano practice. Jada and I investigated some possibilities for visiting the National Parks around Golden Gate bridge, but most are closed Tuesday and Wednesday (Presidio and Fort Point), and the Alcatraz tours had no availability. Muir Woods is on the way to Redwoods, so we’ll just stop through there on the way.
A lunch time, we walked downtown and stopped at a place called zPizza that we had seen the night before for slices. It’s a .8 mile walk downtown from the apartment according to Google Maps, but we hardly noticed. The girls haven’t complained yet. I had a single slice of their BBQ pizza and a pear salad. Jada had 2 slices, and the girls each had one slice. As soon as we got back from lunch we went to the pool for the whole afternoon. The sun was out, but it wasn’t more than 73 degrees. The water seemed to be slightly heated because I was expecting it to be ice cold, but it wasn’t. The breeze was cool too. We all got ever so slightly burned, so we’ll need to use sunscreen tomorrow.
After showering, we walked back downtown to dinner at Cafe Yulong a Chinese restaurant. We were the only ones in there at the time so we had immediate service at all times. Mountain View seems like a late dinner town. The entrees are big so we ordered 3 and shared - sweet and sour chicken, chicken and cashews, and beef and broccoli. It was all very yummy, but we were worried about the sugar content of the sweet and sour sauce for Ellen who blew up at bed time. We stopped at a book store on the corner down from the restaurant on the way home. After the girls went to bed, Jada and I tried to catch up on some TV on Hulu, but we just couldn’t seem to keep the buffer full resulting in a 42 minute program taking 3 hours to watch. I mostly read the book I had bought in Yosemite called Oh, Ranger! made up of stories of adventure at our National Parks. I had been thinking about buying it all summer, and I finally decided to pick it up just in case it wasn’t at the last stop on our trip. Tomorrow will be another relaxing day. We did the big touristy stuff of San Francisco last time we were here. It’s just nice to not have to do anything for a couple days.
August 4: Mountain View, CA
We all woke up really late today. I didn’t get out of bed until 7:30am. The girls were quiet again this morning...at least, we couldn’t hear them. I made oatmeal for breakfast again with a bit extra to just microwave tomorrow so we don’t have to make a mess of Pete’s kitchen(and it will take less time so we can rush into San Francisco traffic). After Jada got up, we got the girls started on piano practice. Unfortunately it took them about 2 hours to complete 1 hour’s worth of practice once you factor in complaining time which we don’t count. Then it was off to the grocery store to pick up provisions for our last 2 nights of camping on this trip before we reach home.
Lunch was easy today since we had brought home leftovers from dinner last night. The girls then got ready to go swimming while Jada and I looked through all the pictures from the second half of our trip in full-sized slide show mode so we could see better which ones worked and which ones can be deleted. We haven’t had anyone to subject to our slide show in the second half of the trip, so we haven’t gotten around to reviewing the pics in a bigger format yet.
We spent 3 hours at the pool again today. All of us got a little bit pink despite using sunscreen today so now we are all green with aloe. Everyone relaxed for a bit before walking downtown to dinner again. The high was only about 70 degrees, so it seemed a little chilly after so many consecutive days flirting with 100 degrees. We went back to the Mexican place we visited on our first night here for food that comes pretty fast, is really yummy, and not too expensive. The girls both finished their massive burritos. We stopped by a used book/music/gift store up the street before heading back to the apartment and found many things to buy. Jada bought a bunch of books(she loves buying used Newbery Award winners at used book prices), and I found a double live album from Eric Clapton at a really cheap price as well. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as they say.
We did some initial packing to get things out of the way for the morning, and we got the girls to bed by 7pm. I think they fell asleep quickly. It was hard to hear much over the dishwasher. We’ll be going to sleep shortly ourselves since we have an early day tomorrow. The plan is to leave early to get through the morning traffic and out the north side of San Francisco to stop at Muir Woods National Monument, and then on to Redwoods National and State Parks which will almost get us to Oregon, and the land of the Ewoks. Temperatures in Crescent City, CA are expected to be in the mid to upper 50’s! We’ll be home in a few days.