Our USA Adventure - Days 54 to 59 - Oakland, Silicone Valley, San Luis Obispo & Hearst Castle

 

My ParkRun in Silicone Valley. It was the 99th ParkRun they had run in Byxbee Park. I had a not very impressive time of 29min 26 sec and came 52nd out of 85 runners (haven't run for about 6 weeks, that's my excuse). However, I did come first in my age category of 65-69 so that was good (I may have been the only one in that age category but that doesn't matter!). It was a lovely, but cold day, everyone was friendly and we had coffee and biscuits at the end! The run started at 8:00am and, with a 45 minute journey time we had to get up early, much to Jackies delight! Have a look at my Relive video of the route (no photos as Jackie didn't take any! Click here

It’s taken me a while to remember what we did on Saturday, and now I have I know why I had blanked it from my memory! We had to get up early, to leave the house at 06.45 for a 45 minute drive to a Park Run in Bixby, near Silicon Valley. The second of two possibles in the whole trip, and he did manage the other, in Tucson too. I went too, because he had a strange Silicon Valley fixation, and I’m in trouble because I didn’t take any pictures of him running his 5k. It didn’t even cross my mind he might want a sweaty running picture on the blog! Anyway, I was doing important encouraging as everyone came past. It was a good atmosphere, full of English accents, and I think he enjoyed himself.

Byxbee Park is right in Silicone valley, 4 miles from both Facebook and Google and I felt I couldn't leave without taking a tour round the major well-known tech companies. It was a Saturday and they were all closed, so I had to console myself with photos outside. Here's Facebook, or Meta as they are now known

We then, yawn, had to, yawn, drive past Apple, Tesla, Hewlett Packard, Meta (was Facebook), yawn, and two garages, the one where Steve Jobs started Apple, and the one where Hewlett and Packard did whatever they did! I’ve had more exciting mornings.....

On a suburbian street close to Stanford university is this building that is now an historic monument. At 367 Addison Avenue, the little garage behind this house is where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started building high tech instruments in 1938, following the advice Stanford University where they had both attended. It is now considered the birthplace of Silicone Valley. A toss of the coin determined the order of their names for the company that we know as HP or Hewlett Packard

Sunday we had another earlyish start, we left at 08.30 for a 4 hour drive to San Luis Obispo or SLO as it is known, for our Thanksgiving Housesit. So here we are with Winston and Stevie, two very cute, indoor cats. Talk about things coming in threes, three lots of free accommodation, and three lots of cats. We had a quick intro from Sharla before we were left to our own devices, and it’s been fab so far. They have a great set of beds, and shelves and climbing trees to keep them occupied. They also have an automatic biscuit dispenser, so at 14.30 and 20.55 a set amount of biscuits is dispensed into two bowls. The funny thing is that it obviously makes a noise that we can't hear, about a minute beforehand as they know, they hear something and wait! They also know that biscuits get stuck behind the little flaps so when they’ve finished little paws go investigating looking for the last few biscuits. It all sounds like the coins falling in a slot machine so it’s like they’ve won the jackpot and is as entertaining for us as them!

Rather than put on loads of photos of the companies we visited, here's a map. Click on each of the green markers and it opens up a box with photos and a little description. Move the map around to see where it is. The first marker is the parkrun. I know you'll be as excited as I was to see all these places and how they relate to each other!

Monday we food shopped (I have an oven, it’s brill), washed and caught up with the Monday Club boys. Just a bit odd to be doing it at lunchtime! Tuesday we drove up the coast to Hearst Castle, the 28 year build of William Randolph Hearst, the media mogul and Julia Morgan the architect. It is an amazing property where he entertained anybody who was anybody from Charlie Chaplin to Winston Churchill. He also had a zoo, till he had to sell off most of the animals, leaving just a few grazers amongst the cattle on the ranch. I did see a striped zebra bottom as we were driving down the highway! Just up the road is an elephant seal beach. It’s a little early for the adults to be on the beach, but there were a few ‘resting’ juveniles. We were fortunate that there was one large bull, 18 feet long, 5000lbs (2.2 tons) who had had enough of eating 200 lbs of fish a day. He was conserving his energy as he won’t go back into the sea till after mating!

So here's are action packed charges for the week. This is Winston, very fluffy and a bit of a torment to Stevie (but she gives as good as she gets)

Today we thought we’d better go and look at SLO, with a self guided tour I’d found. Lots of shopping, but a few interesting buildings, a mission, an Adobe house and a Frank Lloyd Wright building that we walked past, but wasn’t mentioned on my tour, so we didn’t realise till we got a map from the tourist information. (Just a little side note, Tourist information is often located in the Chamber of Commerce, if you are looking!) The ‘highlight’ of the tour, and No1 attraction on Atlas Obscura is Bubblegum Alley, which really is what it says! An alley off the Main Street with endless amounts of bubblegum stuck to the wall! Really quite gross!

And here's Stevie, joining us on the bed 

On a sad note, we heard from Fred that Zeph, who we last saw just over a week ago, is no more. Despite his fluid injections his kidneys just couldn’t take anymore. RIP Zeph

Winston on his activity platform that they really seem to like

It is quite high

Here's Stevie up there looking down on me on the sofa. Am I likely to get jumped on?

Elephant seals on the beach by Hearst Castle. This one's a juvenile with a snout not yet fully developed

Here's a real big boy resting on the beach. He is very large! We spoke to one guy who makes wildlife films for the BBC and National Geographic and he'd managed to film this one coming ashore, a rare sight. 

Look at his big snout. He's huge!

A couple of juveniles practicing fighting

Here's a couple splashing about in the surf

I love this photo of a baby one fast asleep. Apparently elephant seals come back to the beach of their birth twice a year, so they'll be here again in six months

Have a look at this video of the juvenile on the beach. You can see his developing nose

Hearst Castle on the hill as seen from the Visitor Centre. The huge building on the right is the main castle, the cottages on the left are for guests (one cottage has 18 rooms, the other 10, so cottage is not really an appropriate name!). It took 28 years to build and was started in 1919 when WR Hearst was 56 years old and too old to camp up there as he said. He decided to build a little something up there in his 250,000 acre estate and it developed into this huge castle that wasn't finished when he died

The Neptune Pool, originally planned as a water feature it grew!

The main entrance to the building with many sculptures and artifacts from 15th century and some ancient Egyptian imported from around the world  

One of the many very grand rooms inside. They are all so over the top furnished with very expensive original artifacts. Those tapestries on the walls, for example are original. I forget the story behind them but, apparently they are unique and the ones in the Louvre in Paris are copies. These are the originals they told us

All the rooms we visited were so luxurious and this was the last one we visited. Styled as a Roman bath its a huge indoor swimming pool. The ceiling tiles have been removed for an expensive refurbishment. The main reason the Hearst family donated the building to the state was the huge running and maintenance costs required. The family are still around and own much of the land still and occasionally still visit

Todays outing was a walk round the old part of San Luis Obispo. This is the first Presbyterian church, built in the 19th century. I won't put all the photos on from our walk round, instead, if you want to, have a look at out short Relive video which has 10 photos of interesting buildings and the route we took: click here

We saw a couple of birds on our walk round SLO. This looks a bit like a sparrow but it isn't, as it's much smaller. I hope Helen will let me know what it is and I'll add it later! Edit:  Helen, Richard and John, have identified him as a Black Eye Junco. Many thanks, I know it took you a long time

And this one that Helen previously identified. We  thinks its a Black Phoebe

This little pink thing is Stevies favourite toy. For some reason, after a while she takes it over to her water bowl and drops it in! We have to take it off here and go and dry it in the bathroom. Next day, she does the same thing!?! In the background is the automatic feeder and the two  shoots that eject the biscuits into two bowls like money falling out of a one arm bandit

Did we talk about the view from the lounge window? Not bad is it. I'd like to climb that hill over there before we leave. I hope I get time!

And this is the view that greets me as I come in to make morning coffee (after feeding pussy cats of course!)