From the “Birds” to Silicon Valley

Unfortunately, yesterday it was too dark to visit the small town of Bodega, where parts of the film "The Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock were filmed.

So we made up for the visit the next day. What is particularly well known is the very beautiful school building where children and teachers were attacked by the birds. You can easily imagine the scene in this often foggy place with the picturesque buildings.

As we all know, paths are always long in huge California, so it took us a good 3 hours to arrive in Silicon Valley - more precisely, we first looked at the "Computer History Museum".

The route on Highway 1 to the Golden Gate was, as before further north, very beautiful and led through nature reserves and along beautiful coasts. We were able to see seals and even whales off the coast.

The (even more intense) fog and the partly golden brown leaves already indicate that autumn is approaching.

Silicon Valley grew up around Stanford University, which was founded by a railroad magnate and his wife in memory of their son who died early and is one of the most renowned universities in the world. Accordingly, studying at this university is very popular and requires you to be either very talented and/or very prominent/wealthy.

Companies like Intel, Google, (indirectly Apple), ... but also important fundamentals of computer and software technology have their origins here.

Not only the size of Stanford University with its 3,300 hectares of land, but also the endowment's assets of almost 40 billion dollars are dimensions that exceed the annual university budget of any European state.

Silicon Valley itself also has huge areas with the beautiful landscape, the technology companies, the state parks, ... for which you would have to plan a week to see the highlights.

We focused on the computer museum, where we spent a good half day marveling at the beginnings of “computers” up to the present day. Very nicely prepared with live shows of old computer systems - who else worked with punch cards?

In the evening we went back to the nearby coast to spend the night at a campsite.