California Avenue

Now that my own parents live in Mendocino, we usually stay with my in-laws when we visit Palo Alto. But this time, they were renovating their house and staying in a too-small nearby apartment, and we didn't connect with my parents' friends Don and Wendy (who would have happily lent us their Stanford-campus apartment) until too late, so we stayed at the Hotel California, in the California Avenue shopping district. Diana and I had lived two blocks away when I was doing my postdoc at PARC, years ago, not to mention having both lived in other parts of Palo Alto long before then, so it's a very familiar neighborhood.

The street has undergone some changes over the years: Kirk's Hamburgers is now a Starbucks, the movie theater is now a running shoe store, the bookstore with the mossy fountain on the corner is now a pizza parlor, and the other book store is now a stationary supply store. But a lot of it remains the same.

This morning, having nothing better to do (the hotel internet access being a little problematic), I took my camera out for a spin. Here are some of the photos I took.