The Beginning of a New Way to Think About Driving!
The Beginning of a New Way to Think About Driving!
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San JoseContinue south on I-280 to San Jose (Visitor Information +1 408 977 0900), founded in 1777 to raise crops for the nearby presidios of San Francisco and Monterey. The settlement served as the state's first capital between 1849 and 1851. In the 1960s fruit trees gave way to the industrial parks of Silicon Valley.Ghosts of the past remain, perhaps literally, at the Winchester Mystery House (525 S. Winchester Blvd. +1 408 247 2101. Adm. fee), a strange, 160-room Victorian mansion built by Sarah Winchester, widow of the firearms heir. According to legend, a spiritualist medium said she'd live as long as construction continued—and so it did, around the clock, from 1884 until after she died in 1922. Among the house's mystifying features are doors that open to blank walls. Just as mysterious in its way is the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium (Naglee and Park Aves. +1 408 947 3636. Adm. fee). Founded by the Rosicrucians (a group that explores the “development of man's unawakened faculties”), it displays mummies of priests, cats, and even a fish; Egyptian jewelry; and a re-created 4,000-year-old rock tomb. Revitalized in recent years, downtown San Jose is anchored by the San Jose Museum of Art (110 S. Market St. +1 408 294 2787. Closed Mon.; Adm. fee), devoted to 20th-century works. At the Tech Museum of Innovation (145 W. San Carlos St. +1 408 279 7150. Closed Mon.; Adm. fee), a robot will make you a (simulated) lunch. You can “fly” over the surface of Mars via computer animation, extract DNA from a cow's thymus gland, and see how a computer chip is fabricated. Also downtown, the San Jose Historical Museum (Kelley Park, 1600 Senter Rd. +1 408 287 2290. Adm. fee) is a 25-acre [10-hectare] outdoor collection of historic and re-created buildings, including a fruit barn and corner gas station. Quoted from nationalgeographic.com. |
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