Her house is so neat. We slept in a bedroom that is literally right next to a cathedral of redwoods.
It was really fun walking around the town with Kathryn because she knew everyone we passed. La Honda is such a small community and everyone knows everyone else! She said that none of the kids try to sneak into the bar because all of the people in the bar know which kids are actually 21.
We walked down to the duck pond and actually had three ducks follow us for a bit. They were very cute but they didn't like being touched, even though I tried!
Kathryn took us to the Play Bowl which is a big open area surrounded by redwoods. La Honda has a July 4th picnic there plus other events every year, and it's also the place where she and Achim got married! There was a pretty creek running alongside of the redwoods; it was a really beautiful spot and I loved how much it represented her hippie nature.
Josh stood inside of a big redwood tree. The inside of it had been burned out by a fire but the tree continued to grow!
We also walked around Heritage Grove, an old-growth redwood forest. It was beautiful, especially the trees that grow in a spiral pattern! Amazing!
We said goodbye to Kathryn before heading north. She was such a wonderful host! We stopped at Buck's of Woodside on the way; Josh had been there with his dad a few years before and wanted to show me the neat interior. We had dessert and coffee and decided that we wanted to visit Stanford and Google!
The Stanford campus was ridiculous... I guess that's what $600 million per year in donations will get you. Memorial Church was built in 1903 but looks just like the rest of the Mission Revival style campus. The Main Quad is amazing and looks like Disney designed it!
They had a group of statues by Rodin; Josh thought he looked just like the "confused" pose!
Unfortunately, we couldn't find a Stanford sign ANYWHERE! The biggest "Stanford" we found was on a map, so Josh posed for a photo to show we were actually in Stanford... since for a while we weren't totally sure.
We drove to Mountain View next and walked around the Google headquarters campus. That was ridiculous. Josh mentioned a documentary he had seen on Google and said that all of the food at the cafeterias is free, and that they have "adult playgrounds" with movie-watching and video game-playing areas. There were a ton of people still at work at like 7 PM, and most of them were getting a delicious-smelling dinner at one of the many cafeterias... it seems like working at Google would be ridiculous, but I don't think they want you to leave home! Though I'm not sure if you'd ever want (or need) to... they even had a barber truck and laundry facilities.
We got to San Mateo around 8 PM, right when our hosts said they'd be home. We called Lisa and she said that even though she wasn't home, we should just go in and make ourselves comfortable since the door was unlocked. It was very bizarre for us to enter an empty house and hang out alone! The first people to come home were the two children and their au pair. The au pair, Lea, is a 19 year old girl from France who has been with the family for a month and will be living with them for a year. After, she'll go back to university in France. Kaizen is twelve years old and his sister, Soleil, is six. Apparently home schooling is very popular in California since this is the second family we met who home schools!
Lisa and Joe got home around 9 PM after putting an offer on a new house. We ate a late dinner of pasta cooked by Lea using her Italian aunt's recipe - delicious! - and discussed our plan for tomorrow. They gave us some suggestions for things to do in San Francisco: I am excited!
Josh's high for today was walking around La Honda with Kathryn: it was so neat how she knew everyone! My high was visiting the Google campus... it really was ridiculous to see how much money they have invested in their employees... and how much they want their employees to stay at work... Josh's low for the day was getting stuck in traffic after leaving the Google campus. It was like 7:30 PM and the traffic was awful! My low was staying only one night in La Honda... if our schedule was slightly more flexible, I would've liked to stay another night. I didn't think there would be so much to enjoy in La Honda! Josh's "ho" was not being able to find a name at Stanford! It was so strange since "University of Florida" is everywhere at the UF campus. My "ho" was a joke that Josh told while we were at Stanford... I joked that we should ask a cop where Stanford is and Josh impersonated the Dave Chappelle skit and said the cop would reply, "Hold it right there! ... You're in Stanford." (Maybe only funny if you've seen the skit?)
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