Tall Trees and High Tech

January 10

Charlotte:

We woke up and went in the car to go to a walking trail in a park about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. It is called Big Basin. On the way, we stopped a couple of times to look at the beautiful views. The car ride was very twisty and turn-y. Sam and I were both feeling sick, but we finally got there and could get out of the car.

Right at the entrance, there was a big tree with a cave in it. It was so cool inside!

We got a map from the information centre and went to the trail. It wasn’t a long trail, but there were numbers on it with descriptions on the map.

There were lots of redwood trees that were so tall. We learned lots about redwoods, the biggest trees in the world. This type of tree was around when dinosaurs were around. Some of the trees in the park were almost 2000 years old! We saw so many cool trees, like the “mother of the forest” (tallest tree) and the “father of the forest” (biggest circumference).

We also saw lots of different mushrooms and ladybugs.

Sam:

We then were getting hungry, so we decided to go to a nearby Popeyes on the way to Apple headquarters in Cupertino. We first went around the old headquarters called Apple campus, then went to the newer one called Apple park and it was a giant “spaceship” building. The main building is a huge circle. The entire roof is solar panels. We didn’t get to go in any of them but they were both cool to look at. In the visitor centre, there was a big model of the campus. They gave us an iPad to look at the model which turned it into augmented reality, which added lots of realistic details to the plain white model. We didn’t spend much time there because we wanted to look at the Google building more.

At Google, we went to the sculpture garden first. It has huge statues of all the different versions of Android, which were named after desserts. We took a few pictures of the different sculptures in the garden, but it was in quite a bit of disrepair.

Next, we went into the gift shop, where I bought a YouTube hat and Dad bought a water bottle.

Charlotte:

Then we tried to go to the visitor centre, but we couldn’t find it. Dad and I did go to see some of the Google buildings.

After that, we went back to the hotel room and got some fish and chips delivered by Uber Eats. Sam and I didn’t like it, unfortunately, but Dad did. Mom got hot dogs with curly fries (that she shared with me). We went to bed early.