With a niece and nephew at Berkeley, not to mention a bunch of good friends and fam, my wife and I always find ourselves vacationing in the Bay. We love the weather, food, shopping and people. The air is so fresh and there are a grip of technology companies obviously. I always mention that we’ll retire in NorCal (Walnut Creek? Atherton? Palo Alto?) and the more we visit, the more I seriously think it’s a great alternative to the hustle and bustle of SoCal.
iPhone shot of Walnut Creek – we had a great dinner here the first nite @ Lark Creek Grill. Probably the best Filet Mignon I’ve ever had – with a Root Beer float for dinner LOL. Wendy loved the salad and said the Salmon was “okay”…
Thursday AM we headed into the city, Union Square to be exact for some shopping and of course…
This Lees is in the San Fran/Little Saigon area…a bit sketch but well worth the Iced Goodness in a cup that I so crave.
Obligatory iPad billboard shot (still waiting for my 3G shipdate)
We hit a few stores and we get to Louis Vuitton and they ask me to leave my full cup of Iced Goodness at the door…COME ON!! I set it on a table, pressure Wendy into getting her bday gift so I can get back to my coffee LOL.
Next up was the Market Street mall (not sure of the actual name) – it’s pretty sick with a Nordstroms, Bloomingdales, 4 stories (or more?) and some good eats in the basement food court. They also have these super sick touchscreen directories.
The basement of this place has one of best food courts (selection and actual food) that I’ve been to. I’d eat out for lunch everyday if I was near this place…I opted for a pretty weird combination from Bristol Farms. YUM.
We finished up shopping and then had a nice dinner @ Cheesecake Factory with Wendy’s friend Alicia and her husband Gabe…for once I didn’t take pics, tried to be polite while eating. Gabe has an insane “Impala” tattoo on his forearm…I kept thinking, damn that would hurt like hell if I tried to do that with “Lamborghini” on mine…I’d probably only get to “Lam” with my threshold for pain lol. BMW or Audi get the easy win here…
The next day we headed out to Castro Valley to meet with my buddy Kirby and his wife Lisa. They’re always super gracious to us, putting up with my weird requests for locations to visit…first up was “Ramen Friday” (my facebook friends will get this) – they took us to their fav. ramen place in San Mateo.
I gave the deluxe pork ramen a whirl (shoyu)- great noodles, not bad overall – but can’t touch Santouka here in Costa Mesa. The place was crazy busy, a testament to how good it was.
From there we hit up Carlsen Porsche in Redwood City. They had a new 997.2 GT3RS in white that Kirby and I wanted to checkout in person. I caught the Grey/Red at the LA Autoshow Media Day, but had yet to see one in White/Gold…
I ain’t gonna lie – this car looked GOOD. Wasn’t sure about the “gold” in person, but it looks great in white. Not sure if it’s $148K great, but see for yourself. If you have an unlimited budget and are looking for a true engineering / race spec piece, this is the vehicle to buy out of the box. Missing from these shots is Kirby screaming “WHOA!” then running off as a bee came near us while checking out the car…
We headed off to Stanford mall to hang for a bit, but the real cool stuff happened next. The holy grail…Apple Headquarters – yes, the place where dreams are made. Kirby hit-up one of his buddies to see if we could take a quick tour, but it was too late in the day…
Infinite Loop….BOOM. I wasn’t the only one taking pics…it’s like the holy land for some people LOL. I missed the Corporate store by 15 minutes (closes at 5:30PM) otherwise I’d have a grip of new Apple Schwag to showoff LOL. There’s always next time, especially since we were able to get in touch with Kirby’s buddy Nizam (sp?)
Lemme keep it real. I’ve shaken hands and talked with some pretty cool car industry individuals…Steven Winkleman (Lamborgini SpA president), Valentino Balboni (Famed Lambo Test Driver), even Jay Leno. They all pale in comparison to getting a pic with Nizam (Kirby was dying when I mentioned this) – you see, he happens to be a significant guy for something you may have heard of…iTUNES. (insert BOOM!) I couldn’t help the finger point, I get that from Jarasa lol.
After leaving Apple Corp (I should’ve asked around to see when my 3G ipad was gonna ship LOL) we headed to Santana Row for some dinner…Santana Row is where NorCal holds their own version of Cars and Coffee. We had dinner at LB Steakhouse where I opted for some Fried Chicken since I was “steaked out” from our previous two dinners.
This was a HUGE piece of chicken – I ate maybe a quarter of it? VERY good though.
The next morning it was time to leave, but not before a quick trip to Lees (Milpitas this time) then to Santana Row to checkout the cars. The L4P (Luxury4Play) crew came out in force – some solid cars albeit not a whole lot quantity wise…
I believe this was Knick’s new daily beater, a MBZ CLK Black Series
A sick SL with an LP560 Front bumper conversion, this one came from Symbolic and was actually on the run with us in SoCal last year – apparently the new owner is from NorCal
Alex’s (Sharkwerks) sick 997.1 GT3RS – keep an eye out for this car on a future episode of Supercars Exposed – good seeing you again Alex!
– okay, that’s enough for now, almost done but…to be continued.