Pismo Beach

Pismo beach is located on the highway 101 between San Jose and LA. It was a get together trip of our hostel gang. Pismo is famous for the ATV’s (All terrain vehicles) and Sky Diving. We only did the ATVs though.

Santa Cruz

In my previous post I wrote about Half Moon Bay. In this post I will write about Santa Cruz, and this is not the one in Mumbai. Unlike half moon bay, Santa Cruz is actually a proper city with an easily accessible beach. There is a bus every hour to/from San Jose and the ride is 1hr one way. I pinged one of my juniors who was in Santa Cruz for information but then on the day I woke up late that messed up my schedule. That is the biggest disadvantage of using public transport.

Half Moon Bay

I started my US blog series with an introduction to California and then wrote about San Francisco. The assumption I am going with is that most people who are traveling to the west coast will probably be staying in the Silicon Valley. In the next few posts I will write about the beaches I visited when I was in the bay area. The nearest beach to visit by public transport is Half Moon Bay. Of course you could drive there, which is the most convenient way.

Exploring Hampi

Hampi, the once pride of Vijayanagara empire is now nothing but ruins. On one side you will admire the architectural beauty this place has to offer and at the same time you can’t help but feel bad thinking how awesome it would have been if it was not destroyed. And as most blogs have pointed out, Hampi is to be explored and not toured.

A collage of few of sculptures found in various places

San Francisco

If you watch SciFi movies, then you would have definitely seen San Francisco. That is the city that has gone through hell. Well, if not anything then the Golden Gate Bridge deserves to be mentioned. So far it has gone through alien attacks, terminators, apes, mutants, kaiju and even the 2012 apocalypse. I was in the city and can assure that in spite of all this, the city is fine and awesome. Don’t trust me? See it for yourself.

California 101

In my previous blog posts, I wrote about my trip to Hong Kong and Vancouver.  Not even a month has elapsed since I came back and I was asked to travel to our company headquarters in California for 7 weeks. Yeah, my company is making me a globetrotter. The bay area, as it is called, is kind of like Bangalore. Pleasant weather, IT crowd, traffic, food from all the cuisines and a lot of people speaking Telugu and Tamil (not kidding). For  people who do not know about the Silicon Valley, this post would serve as an introduction and for rest of the folks Route-101 is the freeway that connects the cities in the valley (see what I did there with the title).

Manchanabele - breakfast ride !!

It was just one week from our previous Belur-Chikkamagluru-Halebidu trip and Sagar already started missing highways and bike rides :D. Early morning rides would be best though getting up is a problem for most of us and that too on a Sunday.  We wanted to explore some closest gateways to Bangalore, Manchanbele and  Dodda Aladha Mara roughly being 50 kilometers from Bangalore was perfectly fitting our requirement.