4. Silicon Valley Tour

After seeing a company of Tesla’s magnitude from the inside at its facilities in Fremont, California, and since we were in the San Francisco area, with Silicon Valley so close, we could not miss the opportunity to take a walk through Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino or Menlo Park, where some of the largest and best valued companies in the world such as Google, Apple or Facebook are located.

San Francisco, besides being a city famous for the Golden Gate Bridge or Pier 39, is also known as the cradle of most startups in the United States.

Any self-respecting software company is either born or ends up moving some of its facilities to the Bay Area and when you arrive, you realize that the technological revolution lives here.

Silicon Valley is the name given to the area south of San Francisco Bay and it mixes green and natural landscapes with state-of-the-art office buildings and some dormitory neighborhoods that house the executives of the companies in the area at prohibitive prices.

Tesla has made its mark here, and we can count the number of Elon Musk cars in the area in the thousands. Some are as unique as one of the first Tesla Roadsters ever built.

The first stop on the tour is Apple as it is the furthest away, in Cupertino. The address One Infinity Loop, tells us that we have arrived and we can see the old facilities full of young people with laptops of the apple brand.

Apple has been building for years Apple Park, its new facilities are circular in shape, solar-powered, and designed by architect Norman Foster costing a whopping 5 billion dollars.

Although they are closed to the public (like the rest of the companies). Not far away, they have a visitor center where we can learn more about the brand and buy some exclusive products that are only sold there.

Next on the list is Google in Mountain View. What started as an internet search engine, today is one of the most diversified and powerful companies of the 21st century that knows almost every move we make.

The facilities, more than a company, look like a giant university campus, where workers move around in their own network of buses or on bicycles that are spread throughout the area.

Surprising is the diversity and youth of the workers, who, although they look like interns, let it be known that they are not there by chance but because of their brilliant academic records.

Some of the common areas in addition to gardens, hammocks, or tables for outdoor dining, also have beach volleyball courts or even the skeleton of a T-Rex.
The atmosphere is casual and informal and we did not manage to see anyone dressed in a suit and tie despite being in one of the largest financial powers in the world.

We also found Android sculptures scattered around the campus with its most famous versions such as Oreo, Marshmallow, or Kitkat.

We take the opportunity to also make a stop at Stanford University as it is the incubator not only for some of the ideas of Silicon Valley but also to gestate some of the personalities that lead them as Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Peter Thiel among others.

Finally, we put ‘’1 hacker way’’ in the GPS or what is the same, the address of Facebook.

And although the GPS tells us that we have arrived, we do not see anywhere any logo or anything that makes us understand that we have arrived at the facilities of the largest social network in the world.

If it weren’t for the million blue bikes that are parked all over the campus, the buses that constantly take workers to and from work, and the bright colors of the buildings, it would be difficult to see that we are at the Facebook facilities in Menlo Park.

We use the bikes to ride around the campus and get to the ‘’like’’ metal sign and the only place where we manage to see the word ‘’Facebook’’ written. The same sign that was used by Sun Microsystems and that perhaps as a little wink, or to save costs, they have kept.

It’s getting dark and it’s time to head back to the hotel, we have to pack our bags again because tomorrow we’ll be heading south. A road trip through Big Sur and some of the most beautiful places in California awaits us until we reach Los Angeles, where we will attend the Boring Tour and The Boring Company’s Hyperloop Pod Competition.

Continue with the last chapter: 5. Hyperloop Pod Competition & Boring Tunnel