Memorial Weekend Getaway

I've been planning for this trip since last month coz of the long weekend. Usually we just stay home or have BBQ with friends but once in a while, it's fun to go on a trip and experience life in another city. We decided to go to San Jose, the home of Silicon Valley, to check out what they have in store for us.. On our way to North Cali, we stopped by at Monterey.

Day 1 - Monterey
We left at 8ish and it's raining in LA. I heard from the news while I'm packing that there was a tornado in Riverside. I never heard of a tornado that touches down in the southland. I know we have earthquakes but not tornadoes. I was actually having second thoughts leaving but when I checked the weather in San Jose, it's sunny.. so we're good. We stopped by at Mickey Dee's (aka McDo) to grab something to eat and then we filled up our gas. The trip was smooth until we got into Highway 198 which is an hour drive of zig zag road. I almost puked coz there was really lots of turns and hills but in spite of all that, the scenery was magnificent!

We reached Monterey around 1pm then we went to my favorite spot, the garden with lots of pink flowers. This is one of the tourist spots in North Cali and it's an hour drive from Frisco. We're actually looking for a Bed & Breakfast Inn coz we havn't tried that yet but it cost $200 a night.. so scratch that! Prices really go up during holiday so we might try it in some other day.

We had lunch at Louie Linguini's and we ordered Cioppino which is one of their specialties. It's like kalderata with seafoods on it which is kinda weird. =P





More Monterey pix here.

Lakers was playing that day for Game 2 against Spurs and we dont wanna miss it. It's good that we have TNT in our room for the NBA playoffs but Darwin still recorded it in TiVo so we can watch and play the Kobe "moves" in slow-mo (which he always does). We put our jerseys on while watching the game... sooo crazy! Lakers won 101-71. WooHoo!





After the game we went to Fry's Electronics at Sunnyvale to get our geek on! It's good to have someone who's tech savvy and who can relate to what you're saying. Actually, Darwin is more geeky that I am =P Sunnyvale is the original Fry's store and I noticed that they don't have a "theme". I later found out that the second Fry's that opened in Fremont started the "theme" store =P Here in Burbank, it's sci-fi then Alice in wonderland in Woodland Hills.


Day 2 - Winchester Mystery House
I love going to education trips like musuems, old houses, historical landmarks, etc and the Winchester was on top of my list on places to go to this year. We're actually planning to got to Washington DC this fall and I hope it will materialize =P Need to start doing research now about DC and book flights and hotels so we can get discounts.

Anyways, this beautiful but bizarre 160-room Victorian mansion was built and constantly added on to by rifle heiress Sarah Winchester over a period of four decades. An architectural marvel, this place is so bizarre, you just have to check it out. Windows are built into the floor, staircases lead to nowhere, a chimney rises four floors, and doors open onto blank walls. With 4 stories, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, and 950 doors, the guided tours can be quite head-scratching. It took us 2 hours to tour the whole house.

Official site: http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/





More Winchester pix here

After the tour, we went to downtown San Jose, Cupertino, and Palo Alto and stayed for a couple more hours. Google is supposed to be part of the itinerary coz Mountain View is in Silicon Valley, but we decided to skip it because it's getting dark.

-Fanime @ San Jose Convention Center
-Homouroboros Exhibit
-1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino - Apple HQ
-Stanford University




More San Jose pix here.

We checked-in at our hotel in San Bruno around 9ish and we're sooo tired and all I want to do is sleep =P It's good that there are restaurants around our area. There's Cleo's Brazilian Steak House which I think is famous because it's so busy and there's a long wait outside the restaurant. We waited for a lil while coz the waiter told us it he can get us seated in a few minutes. We waited, then waited... then 10 minutes have passed and we cant wait anymore. So we got out of the restaurant and crossed the street and end up having dinner at Ihaw-Ihaw. We ordered sinigang na belly fish and pork inihaw. Yummy!

After dinner, we feel like watching Indian Jones, so I googled for a movie theater and found one in San Mateo. We took the side streets instead of the freeway but when we reached our destination, we decided to call it a night coz I'm a 'lil scared. It's already 12MN and I dont wanna stay out late in a city I'm not familiar with =P

Day 3 - San Francisco
Our hotel serves free breakfast so we had bagel with cream cheese to start the day. We left around 10ish and since we need cash to pay the toll to cross the Golden Gate bridge and water, we decided to go to the grocery to get cash back and bottled water (Hit two birds with one stone, aight!) Yup, here in the States, they let you withdraw cash from your debit/ATM card as you pay your groceries to the cashier. It makes life easy! On our way to Safeway, we accidentally saw Youtube's HQ so we had photo-ops =P

Itinerary:
-Youtube HQ
-Muir Woods National Park
-Pt. Bonita Lighthouse
-Union Square
-Yancy's Saloon






We watched the Lakers game at Yancy's Saloon which Darwin discovered through Yelp.com. The bar is similar to McLaren's in HIMYM and I don't see anything like this back home, coz in LA it's all commercialized like BJ's and Hooters. I only had one Corona and that's it, I dont feel like drinking that night coz I'm still full from the late lunch that we just had at Union Square. Our team lost though, but it's all cool. As we're walking towards our car, I discovered that I dont have my iPhone. So I run and even jaywalked (see pix below) and there it is, my iPhone still on the floor. Thank God it's still there! This is the 2nd time that I ALMOST lost my iPhone, the first one was when I was shopping at Banana Republic and just left it at the shoe section.



More Frisco pix here

Muir Woods National Park

Excerpt from wikipedia:
Muir Woods National Monument is a unit of the National Park Service in Marin County, California, 12 miles (19 km) north of San Francisco. It protects 554 acres (2.24 km²) of forested area populated by Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), one of the last remaining stands in the immediate San Francisco Bay Area.

Such a great place to enjoy mother nature. I don't know that Frisco has hidden treasure like this.. More trivia.... the Sequoia tree is the tallest tree in the world.

height = 115.5 m (379.1 ft)
diameter = 8 m (26 ft)



More Muir Woods pix here

Day 4 - Back to Lalaland
We left the next day and as the song goes... I left my heart in San Francisco (Love this pix) I'd actually want both of us in the picture just like what we did in New York with the LOVE sign, pero dyahe si Darwin eh =P



Flashback 2005