Day Two: Street View may also have helped

Day Two, and we're already taking a break. Just a 2 hour drive from Salinas to my college roomie's apartment in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco. She was working in her brain-poking lab till 5:30, so we tried to drag our heels as much as possible, seeing some sights along the way. Here is something we should have planned out more carefully.

We stopped at the San Francisco 49ers headquarters in Santa Clara, hoping to spend an hour or so driving around, peeking in on a pick-up game between off-season players. We packed Mike's Joe Montana football just in case we ran into the legend and he wanted to toss the ball around. Of course, when we arrived, it was a beautiful building (flying a 'Niners flag under the American one) with some branded SUVs in the "Restricted Parking" lot. We snuck a couple of pictures from across the street, then were back on the 101 about fifteen minutes after we'd disembarked. Five hours until Robyn gets out of her lab.

We thought we'd explore Mountain View a bit, so we got off a couple miles up the road, right in front of the Google compound. There was a sign saying "Visitor's Lobby," so we thought we'd pop in and kill a few hours with a quick tour and some free T-shirts. Passing fleets of Google bicycles, two "Expecting Mothers" parking spots, and the famous Google mini-vans, we took advantage of the free valet parking and trotted into the lobby. Turns out there's a strict closed campus policy, and visitors without an employee accompanying them are promptly escorted off the premises. We grabbed some free Naked Juice and got back on the freeway. Twenty minutes killed. We should have asked Jeeves.

The drive through the Stanford campus was pretty but it couldn't last forever. Candlestick Park was closed and, though it was awesome to be only a huge parking lot and a chainlink fence away it, one can only drive around it so many times before the drug dealers doing business across the street start to get suspicious. Even getting lost on the way back to the freeway was little help: we arrived at Robyn's apartment at 2.

In any case, we're here now, and it's good to have an oasis to relax in for a few days before we embark on the rest of our journey. We've got a couple folks we'll be visiting and many cool sites we're looking forward to seeing again. And, with Robyn's rad apartment at least half-filled with familiar furnishings, San Francisco is homey and comfortable. Drink up, camels! It's going to be a vast desert before we're staying with friendly faces again.

Today we listened to: Willie Nelson Essentials, Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? (Harvey Danger), and the first hour of the audiobook of On the Road.

Mystery ask-us-about-us-when-we-get-home words for today: "bronze spider"

Mike's blog: astoriedyear.blogspot.com