July 5 - 10, 2016 - West Coast College Visits

July 5 - 10, 2016 West Coast College and Friend Visits

My daughter and I flew into Spokane to start our road trip of some West Coast college visits. We started what I thought would be a two hour drive to Walla-Walla, which was a gross miscalculation or misreading of my printed Google Maps information. We ended up driving through the most desolate of landscapes for four to five hours in eastern Washington to Walla-Walla.

Walla-Walla was an interesting mix of winery town and college town for Whitman College.

Whitman had a surprisingly beautiful campus and wonderful artwork. 

From Walla-Walla, we drove along the Columbia River Gorge area to Hood River where I windsurfed in years past and is now also a kite surfing mecca

and into Portland. We stayed at the White House in a lovely area of NE Portland.

We visited Reed College in SE Portland.

From Reed, we visited Lewis and Clark College 

and then flew to Oakland, CA

It was strange to suddenly be in the whizzing traffic of the Bay area again. We drove north to the Berkeley area to stay with my old friend Larry and visit U Cal Berkeley.

It was eye opening to go from being one of a few students visiting Whitman to being one of over 200 anonymous students visiting Cal.

We cut the virtual tour short and drove to San Francisco instead to eat dim sum!

We drove through Fisherman’s Wharf and then to Lombard Street. Here's the view looking towards the East Bay.

We drove south to our old stomping grounds around Stanford. So amazing to run the Stanford Dish Hill again after about 10 years.  The dry grass of the hills, the views of the Bay; that is the most beloved place in the Bay Area for me. It is the peaceful center in a maddening rush of Silicon Valley.

From there, we drove south to Santa Clara to see Heather, an old work friend from WebTV.

The next morning, we met up with some more old friends from my years in Silicon Valley. So nice to see Steve and Nico at various old haunts.

After soaking up the lovely Palo Alto light, we drove through the mountains to the sea in Santa Cruz and toured the U Cal Santa Cruz campus. It is completely different. It looks like a National Park in the redwoods.

We stayed in a little cabin by the oceanside and played at the beach. We ate seafood by the beach and finally had to drive back to Palo Alto to say good bye for a month.