1.
Daytime stuff:
(a) The
Intel Museum in Santa Clara, right by San Jose, is worth a visit. M-F, 9 - 6, Admission and parking are free. Say 1+ hour.
(b) Ditto Winchester Mystery House. Say maybe 2 hours. It's the kind of place you'd like to see only once, boring after that.
(c) Go over to the
NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Mt. View. where the 85 fwy meets the 101 freeway, just west of San Jose.
(d) Also right there is the
NASA Ames Exploration Center.
Very interesting. You can handle stuff. Maybe 2 - 3+ hours for both of the above combined. Admission and parking are free.
(e) Go take a look at Stanford University, which is a little further northwest by Menlo Park where Mrs. Fields invented her cookies, & Palo Alto. You have to pay to park there, but it's one of the top universities of the world & worth seeing. Wave at Steve Jobs' house as you drive through Palo Alto. Stay out of East Palo Alto. I warned you.
(f) Drive northwest over the hill & go to the north end of Half Moon Bay past the airport. Drive out to the parking lot (free) where you see the giant radar dish. Park & walk out to look at world famous big-wave surf spot, Mavericks. The surf break is really far offshore, so you need binoculars to see the surfers out there defying death. Maybe you'll even see me take off on a monster!
(g) If you have weekend daytime, go up to Berkeley, to see the Cal campus, and visit the
Lawrence Hall of Science on the hill above the campus. You can touch stuff there, it's one of the better public science museums I've seen.
So there's about 2 days worth of sights to see, that'll keep you busy & be real interesting and fun, mostly free.
2. Nighttime stuff:
(h) Go see a
San Jose Earthquakes MLS soccer game. Exciting, fun, inexpensive. This would be THE highlight of your trip.
(i)
Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mt. View just NW of San Jose has lots of great concerts, top acts. I've caught some great concerts there. Cruise the website for show schedule. I'm not sure if that's happening or not at this time of year.
And, SFO is NOT just a close drive.
If you can avoid rush hour it's still a 45 min to 1 hour drive, lots of traffic.
It's far better & prettier to avoid the 101, take the 280 freeway from San Jose to San Francisco.
If you think of going up to SFO during rush hour, don't bother to attempt it, it'll just be miserable, defer San Francisco to some future visit.
Better yet just forget San Francisco & go to Yosemite instead.
