Page 88 - 2017 Travel Guide to California

INSIDER’S
»
TIP
Mingle with Silicon Valley’s
creative types at the FIRST
FRIDAYS ART WALK each month
(except January and July), when
downtown San Jose museums are
free and galleries stay open late
for an art crawl along South First
Street. Live music and special
performances take place at
various venues downtown,
including in SAN PEDRO SQUARE,
a bustling historic food hall with
music on stage Thursdays
through Sundays. Enjoy sampling
dishes from the diverse eateries
and take a seat outdoors around
18th-century PERALTA ADOBE,
San Jose’s oldest building.
86 2017 T R AV E L G U I D E TO C A L I F O R N I A
and dining district with a central European-
style promenade lined with boutiques,
eateries and landscaped gardens. A farmers
market, live music, cultural events, restau-
rants ranging from French bistros to
Mexican taquerias are also big draws to
Santana Row.
Palo Alto, home of Stanford University,
also features a tiny museum significant to
Silicon Valley history: the HP Garage, the
garage where Stanford classmates Bill
Hewlett and Dave Packard founded
Hewlett-Packard in 1939.
Nestled at the foot of the mountains are
Saratoga and Los Gatos, hamlets with pic-
ture-perfect Victorian homes and
Craftsman bungalows. Vast stretches of
parks, open space preserves and rows of
vineyards and winery tasting rooms cluster
in the surrounding mountains, as well as
south of San Jose, along the Hecker Pass
Highway and around the city of Gilroy,
which is home to an annual Garlic Festival
that draws thousands.
With its Mediterranean climate and loca-
tion 50 miles south of San Francisco and 30
miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, it’s no
wonder that Silicon Valley developed as a
world center for innovation, drawing some
of the best and brightest engineers in the
world to a quiet valley where once only fruit
trees blossomed.
City & Town
San Jose, the county seat of Santa Clara
County, was founded in 1777 and today is
the largest city in Northern California and
tenth largest in the nation. Downtown has
undergone significant revitalization over
the last decade, with historic buildings
such as the California Theatre on the same
block where dozens of software companies
have relocated. In 2014, the adjacent city of
Santa Clara welcomed the opening of Levi’s
Stadium, home to the San Francisco 49ers
NFL team and Super Bowl 50 venue in 2016.
Heritage and Culture
San Jose offers a big-city cultural scene with
first-rate museums that include the Tech
Museum, where visitors discover what
made Silicon Valley successful, the Chil-
dren’s Discovery Museum, the San Jose
Museum of Art and the West Coast’s largest
collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts at
the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and
Planetarium. About 10 percent of San Jose’s
population is Vietnamese, and this ethnic
group has a strong presence particularly in
restaurants along Story Road and at the
Museum of the Boat People in charming
History Park, which also features buildings
representing Portuguese, Chinese, Italian
and other ethnic communities that were
instrumental in the city’s long history.
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