Bay Area: places less traveled

Instead of the popular places in Bay area, such San Francisco Downtown, during our trip we went to places less traveled. In addition to treasure island, UC Berkeley campus, we also hiked on bay trails, east shoreline of the bay area - McLaughlin Seashore state park, Albany Bulb, and HQs of Google, Facebook and Apple

Bay trail is an ambitious of project for bay area, when completed, it will be about 500 miles long! We only walked portion of trail #12. The trail is long, may be better suited for bike ride if one wants to finish even a sector in a day. The HQ of Tech Giants really showed their characters - Google has an open campus, in fact they have tourist guide stations on campus, a lot of trees, beach volley fileds and a big multi purpose track & field park across the street from its main buildings. Facebook has a big campus, ugly building - looking from outside, they are kind of cheap on branding - the entrance sign for the company is made from canvas from Sun Microsystem's sign ! Apple's HQ at 1 infinite way is a closed complex, though looked much nicer than Facebook's. The much hyped Apply Park for its airy, openness design turned out to be closed campus as well. Some people used drones to peek inside the enclosure wall.  

                           

 Bay Trial, map #12

Albany Bulb 1

Albany Bulb 2

Albany Bulb #3 - Mudflats

McLaughlin Seashore State Park

Oakland 

Oakland - downtown in the center back

Full view of SF bay from Berkeley Hill

Google HQ

Google HQ Campus

Facebook Entrance Sign was made from Sun Microsystem's 

Facebook, 1 Hacker Way

Ugly Facebook Building

1 infinite loop - Apply HQ

Apple Park is isolated from surroundings by concrete wall

Apple Park outskirt