California, 12th November, leaving Capitola and Stanford University

Capitola is a rather upmarket town on the north of Monterey Bay. It was developed as a tourist resort in 1869 and is full of trendy cafés and art galleries. We left there on a steely grey morning, before the shops were open and the people came out. Climbing the hill out of town I stopped to take this picture of the pier, very Cannery Row. A little further north provided some interesting light on the shore.

After our trip up the coast Mairi fancied something a little different so we diverted inland to Stanford and the university. This is situated in the Santa Clara (Silicon) Valley, 37 miles from San Francisco.

On our arrival and after we had found a visitor car park (which took some time), I was amazed by the university's size and opulence.

Stanford was founded by Leland Stanford, a railroad tycoon and named in honour of his only child who had died aged 16. It was opened in 1891. According to it's first charter the number of admittance places was to be divided equally between male and female, although this was altered later to a 3 male to 1 female ratio and remained like this until the early 1960's!

The campus was originally designed by Frederick Olmsted, who created the layout, and architect Charles Coolidge who designed the Romanesque style stone buildings linked by arches. A great deal of the campus was destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 although much of the old quad remains.

The Hoover tower, standing at 87m was finished in 1941.

We visited the library and found that there was an exhibition of photographs by Robert Fitch, who chronicled Martin Luther King's political life and the struggle for civil rights after his death.

Our appetites whetted, we next went to the Cantor centre for the Visual Arts (which also had a nice dining room). This building was heavily damaged by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1986 and has been restored and a new wing built on. In the grounds is the Rodin garden containing a large number of Rodin statues. More Rodin can be found inside the gallery and a casting of Rodin's Gates of Hell forms part of the entrance to the new wing (the last photo in this group is from the gates).

Mairi decided to sit on the grass and read while I went into the gallery. I was immediately fascinated by the view from a stair well through barred windows on to the trees and buildings beyond. I show them here in colour and then in monochrome. I unfortunately captured the man a little too late.

I also liked the look of some water fountains attached to a wall.

Again I struck lucky and saw that they had a gallery of Robert Frank pictures, from his 

'America' series, that were not published in the original book. Right up my street! I then discovered that the reason for this photographic cornucopia was that San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is supposed to house the one of the largest collection of photography in the US, was temporarily closed and the collection has been spread across California. Disappointing, in that we hoped to visit when in San Francisco, but at least I had caught up with a little of it.

There was also a large room devoted to more modern art which had this man standing in it. Unmoving. A bit eerie as his eyes definitely followed you round.

We were booked in at the Samuel P Taylor campsite in Point Reyes, some miles north of San Francisco, so we left the campus and drove up, over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. Here we found a launderette and practically stripped off in the car park and washed everything. We were accompanied by a Spanish family who had suitcases of clothes and were using nearly all the machines. They had a little girl who was being rushed round the floor in a trolley by her brother. A couple of hours of entertainment!

A few pictures of our hurried visit through the Golden Gate, with a brief stop at the visitor centre on the far side for rather dull pictures (along with  a few coach loads of others).