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Copyright |
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©2005 Jason Cross
All Rights Reserved
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 Wednesday, November 6, 2002 |
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Yesterday was spent in San Jose exclusively. Going around downtown, you can't help but get the feeling that San Jose is a city in the decline. The downtown is mostly empty, even compared to Des Moines. Most activity in the area centers around the convention center circled by hotels and The Tech Museum as well as the light-rail and bus center where some small businesses are located around the way. I can't help but wonder what the city was like at the height of the Tech surge when everyone thought that sky was the limit and money flowed through the city.
A homeless man asked us for 50 cents. I believe he might have been the former CEO of Pets.com! :)
Yesterday was also a day for work as it was day one of the ISPCon show. Arriving at the show, I was surprised to see how large the convention center was compared with how small the convention itself is this year. I was last at ISPCon in Spring 2000 - Orlando - and it was easily 4x as big as this year. My guess is that both the economy and next week's Comdex Vegas show play largely into the size this year. I did have a chance to meet some vendors and do some passes through the vendor floor which gave me a good idea of what technologies and vendors I want to talk to at greater length when I return tomorrow.
That evening Matt and I met up with his friend Josh for dinner at Faultline Brewing Company. It was pretty typical brew pub fare with great shrimp bisque and a spicy chipotle ravioli.
The weather report last night gave a very high likeliness of rain on Thursday and Friday, so Matt and I decided to step up our plans to drive along the coast up to Muir woods – the area north of San Francisco where there are giant redwood trees (and also where they filmed Return of the Jedi). We started off by driving south-west through the mountains to Santa Cruz. The mountains in northern California are interesting in that they are smallish compared to the greater mountain ranges but are very scenic with dense evergreen forests, rock faces, and many twists and turns.
In Santa Cruz we started at the Boardwalk, an area along the beach with many rides, shops and arcades. Unfortunately it is off-season, so most of the Boardwalk is shut down. It was still a nice area to see – it looks like it would be lots of fun in mid-summer when everything is open and teeming with life. Walking along the beach I found a sand dollar and a shop where I bought a Santa Cruz t-shirt giving me two souvenirs of an interesting area. I love simply walking along a beach, smelling the salt in the air and listening to the rhythm of the waves along the fine sand.
Going further into Santa Cruz we stopped at the Surfing Museum to find it closed. The museum is a little lighthouse-shack on a cliff pointing out into Monterey Bay. There were a handful of surfers in the water at the base of the cliff waiting for waves. They would jump right off the cliff into the water fifteen feet below, sit on their boards until the right wave came, and then ride the wave along the coast for a ways before either getting out of the water or paddling back to start the cycle over again.
For lunch we stopped at Pleasure Pizza, a nice little local pizzeria. It was the perfect Santa Cruz place to eat with lots of surfboard décor, a cute little California girl serving the pizza calling out the names of the pizza as the slices were served up (“Santa Barbara!” “Hawaiian!” “Vindicator!”), and these huge specialty pizzas sold by the slice. The most interesting was a pizza with large prawns on a pesto sauce though I stuck with a slice of Hawaiian and a Sausage-Salami.
After Santa Cruz we headed north up Highway 1 following the coast. The drive offered many scenic Pacific beaches along with several little beach towns. We eventually passed through Pacifica and reached the south side of San Francisco where we took the Great Highway along the west edge keeping to the ocean. This really gave a fascinating view of San Francisco’s many attached yet disparate buildings. We passed through north San Francisco, an area that seemed to be comprised of Chinese restaurants, houses of worship, and beauty salons, drove through the Presidio, and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.
On the north end of the Golden Gate is a spot for cars to pull over for a scenic view and to walk across the bridge. Matt and I grabbed our jackets as the wind off of the ocean was somewhat chilly and walked halfway across the bridge, watching out for bicyclists and crazed drivers. The bridge is massive and impressively high. Walking underneath its red-painted cabling really gave me a sense of how exciting it is to be out here in this classic American destination at the edge of the continent.
Following the Golden Gate, we drove further north past Sausalito until we diverged further west to Muir Woods. Muir is a redwood forest – some trees reaching as high as 380 feet! By this time it was reaching four o’clock giving us one hour until the park closed and allowing for about two miles of trekking through the forest. The forest was very peaceful with other quiet travelers taking in the paths around the giant trees while breathing in the pine-scented air.
Something to note – Muir Woods is where they filmed the Endor scenes for Return of the Jedi! We didn’t see an Ewoks on our trip though.
We continued our trip north until we reached San Rafael and turned south, crossing the bay again though this time on the very long Richmond Bridge. We continued south along I-80 (the same I-80 that passes through Des Moines), stopping in Berkeley for dinner at Genki Japanese restaurant. Finally we crossed the Bay one last time, this time on the Bay Bridge, catching 101 south to San Jose.
All in all it was a great day, a fitting good bye to San Francisco as I will likely remain in San Jose for the rest of the week for the conference. I would have liked to visit the downtown areas again, but I guess that gives a good reason to come back to the bay area one day!
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