We come to the end of another of our road trips and for the final treat we take a visit to Google’s main campus in Silicon Valley. We are lucky enough to experience some of their incredible technology and some tasty free food.

We did a quick lap of the Intel museum where the history of their processors were explained. Some very interesting stuff.

We visit the silicon valley computer history museum and see some very items tracing the history of computers from the abacus right up to the iphone and cloud. There were some incredible things including enigma machine and some massive main frame systems.

Well you can’t be in the US on election day without being sucked into the circus. We were all glued to our TV waiting for what we expected to be a huge Hillary victory. The last few days we had started to see things in a little different, but expected a huge loss to the Don. Hillary was surrounding her self with the rich and famous clebs and she was never seen out of her thousands of dollars pants suits, really keeping her distance to the normal people. As for the media commentators they were (other than FOX) over the top pro Hillary and anti Don unlike our fairly balanced coverage, We saw two of the anchors actually crying at the end that’s how biased they were. Donald on the other hand was carrying on as per usual and saying exactly what heartland USA wanted to hear. There were live crosses to the two stages where they were to take victory or take the loss, Donald’s was a simple stage with a heap of flags and that’s about it. Hillary’s was something you would expect U2 to perform on, A huge lit up map of the USA, video walls, lighting, flags everywhere and even a glass ceiling. She never got to stand on it. and Donald took out the night, what a shock. and to think we were standing in front of the soon to be President of the United States only a week ago listing to his rambles. One thing I will miss is the venomous TV ads from both sides they have been so awful but fun.
There were heap of referendums going on too, Marijuana got legalized in a few states and porn stars don’t have to wear condoms..and Alabama has voted to give its residents the right to bear arms even if the federal gov changes the constitution, a thing they were so sure Hillary was going to do.

Hillary will eat your kids, Donald drowns puppies..that sort of stuff.

On the way to San Jose we visit the Hiller Airport Museum, a heritage centre that has a interesting collection of weird and wonderful aircraft. They have a huge restoration room where volunteers rebuild old planes with incredible detail. One of the highlights was a front section taken from one of British Airway’s early 747s. Its amazing how old the instrument panels were and the first and business class is compared to our modern planes.

We continue to explore San Francisco, visiting China Town, The Cable Car Museum, Levis Museum, Pier 39 and Fishermans Wharf and their hundreds of Seals. Lunch was as the world famous Boidin Bakery down near fishos where we enjoyed an amazing sour dough roll filled with chlli, washed down with a few of San Francisco’s finest including a few tasty Anchor Steams.

The hills here are incredible with huge gradients and really work your calves out. Some buildings drop more than the height of their doors over a house block width. Driving is chaos, you would’t want to have a manual i am glad the hire car is parked. There are heaps of one way streets, trams, trolleys, cable cars and bendy busses that attach to overhead wires. Not forgetting thousands of taxis, Ubers and the pink mostasche wearing Lyfts. Driving in the city is one of the more challenging we have had, and we have driven peak hour in London CDB, New York and Paris.

We jumped in our ‘lovely’ Nissan Sentra and headed towards San Francisco a drive through California’s wine and farming country, taking us about an our and a half. As we get close to the city thick fog greeted us but it soon lifted to reveal a cool but sunny day. We went walking into the city and down to the waterfront for a few refreshments before heading to Mountain View for a secret operation. We returned to San Fran starting off in the Mission District that had a strong hispanic influence before walking off (or at least trying to walk off) the giant burrito that I think will stay in our bodies until well after we get home. (and we only had the small one)

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TIme for lunch and nothing better to wash down beers than a tasty meal at a dive burger joint. We found a great one- Daves Big Burgers. How good it this- a burger on a bun in a box covered with chilli and cheese, yumee!

Our second factory tour for the day took us to Budweisers Californian brewery. This huge plant produces 9 products including their two biggest sellers Bud and Bud Light. Interestingly the beer includes rice as well as barley and takes 24 days from start to finish, where some of the other big breweries we have visited pump their beer out in under a week. They put beech wood in their huge bats, not for colour or flavour but for the yeast to attach to, never seen that before. The tour started off with some tasting, had tastings in the middle and finished with a tasting. Keep away from the Bud as I can drink bath water, but we tried some “craft like’ beer they made that had a distinct popcorn taste, strangely it was pretty tasty.

The first of our day of Factory tours in Fairfield California took us to the headquarters of Jelly Belly. He we saw millions of Jelly Bellys being made in what is a 14 day process. There were some pretty fun flavors including a new range of bad taste ones that were probably for halloween, including booger, dead fish, old socks and ear wax. The gave us a sample of one bean, which was a bit stingy, but at the end of the tour we got a bag of the tasty goodies that we will probably guts down later in the night when we get the munchies.

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This is a cool pub in Chico California. There’s a bit of a bear theme but then again there is a bit of a every theme with heaps of weird artefacts hanging from the roof and strung to the wall. The best bit food is good and the beer is not only tasty but dirt cheap. $10 a jug for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. They even asked for age verification, thinking we might be underage uni students. yeah right do I look underage?

We took a factory tour of Sierra Nevada Brewing, one of the pioneers or craft brewing in the USA. Now spread over 40 acres this state of the art facility was not only flash it was run entirely on solar and other environmental friendly technologies The tour finished at the tasting room where 6 of their tasty brews were sampled. very tasty