I got my bags packed on a roll heading out there and I'm ready to go looking real good

in my passport photo.

Amateur Traveler episode 808. Today the Amateur Traveler talks about hills and hikes, beaches

and beer, weather and wineries, computers, and nerds as we go to the Santa Clara Valley or the Silicon Valley of

California.

Welcome to the amateur traveler. I'm your host Chris Christensen. Today we talk about

my hometown of San Jose, California and the Silicon Valley. This is normally the portion of the show where I'd be introducing a

guest but I don't have a guest for this particular episode because I'm doing

it about my hometown or home city area and even though I have lived in the same house the entire 17 years that I've been doing amateur traveler,

one of the places that I have resisted doing an episode on is San Jose or Silicon Valley where I live and I think the reason for that is that when I grew up

There wasn't a lot to do in San Jose I grew up in California and I grew up an hour and half south of

San Jose and Salinas. And we would come up to San Jose for Easter Ridge, which was one of the

first malls in the area. We would come up for Frontier Village,

which isn't there anymore, which was an Old West theme park.

And we would come up for the Winchester Mystery House, which is still still there and I'll talk about that in a

little bit and the Rosicruition Museum and that was about it.

And so I still have been carrying around with me that even though this is a great city to live in, maybe there's not that much to see.

Couple things have changed my mind to finally do this episode.

One was I had a conversation with someone at the recent Tibex, the Travel Blogging Conference in Spain and said I hadn't done an episode of my hometown.

And they said that that was a mistake because there are so many people who travel sometime to Silicon Valley who would be

interested to know what to do in the weekends or where they could go and that is

true. So that is definitely the thing that finally tipped me over to do this episode.

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