Townhouse Inn Palo Alto

Packing List

by Zartenejal

Palo Alto is very temperate and generally has good weather. Bring a warm sweater for nights and trips to foggy San Francisco. You'll see rain here Nov-Feb most years, and sun during the other months! The closest beaches to Palo Alto are about 30 min away in Half Moon Bay. The water is COLD but lots of people enjoy surfing in wet suits and kids often brave the waters in swim suits on a hot summer day.

Slice of New Orleans in Northern Cal

by Yubert about NOLA

Nola is a bit of New Orleans located in the historic Ramona Street Building in downtown Palo Alto. Menu consists of Creole, Cajun, and Southwestern cuisine. New Orleans favorites, such as hurricanes, fresh oysters, gumbo, seafood jambalaya, and étouffée, are just a few of the classics you will find. Teriyaki Skirt Steak
Jambalaya w/corn bread
Banana Carmel Split

Stanford University

by Ewingjr98

Leland Stanford Junior University, is commonly known as Stanford University or just Stanford. It was founded in 1885 by the former governor of California Leland Stanford in memory of his son who had recently died of typhoid. The university opened in 1891 with 15 professors and 559 students including future president Herbert Hoover. Today Stanford's enrollment is 6,700 undergraduates and 8,000 graduate students.

Campus landmarks that we visited on our short trip include the Main Quad, Memorial Church, Green Library, and the Hoover Tower. The Main Quad is one of the few remaining structures from the original university construction not destroyed by the 1906 or 1989 earthquakes. Memorial Church is the most impressive building on campus with its stained glass and huge mosaics. The original building of the Green Library was built in 1910 and is known as the comical name of the Bing Wing. Hoover Tower stands 285 feet tall, is part of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, and was completed in 1941, a reproduction of the cathedral tower at Salamanca.

Other famous buildings on campus include the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and art gallery, the Stanford Mausoleum and the Angel of Grief, the Rodin sculpture garden, the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden, the Arizona Cactus Garden, the Stanford University Arboretum, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1937 Hanna-Honeycomb House, and the 1919 Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover House.

The Tall Tree

by Ewingjr98

Palo Alto is a busy little town that is home to Stanford University and the birthplace of Hewlett Packard. Between the huge cities of San Jose and San Francisco, Palo Alto offers visitors a small-town version of its larger neighboring cities.

During our visit, we stuck mainly to the University Avenue area, which is where the majority of the town's nightlife, restaurants, and historic sites are clustered. My favorite stop was Stanford University, but I also enjoyed some of the small parks around town like Water Tower Park and Palo Alto Park.

The town's earliest European history dates from 1769 when Gaspar de Portolà visited the area in his search for Monterey Bay. Stanford University was established in 1887, and the founnder also created the town of Palo Alto next to the older town of Mayfield; they were merged into today's Palo Alto in 1925.

Around the time of WWII, Palo Alto became a key city in the high-tech area known as Silicon Valley. Hewlett Packard was created by two Stanford grads in 1939, and in 1951 Stanford Industrial Park, the world's first technology-focused office park, was created. Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and Lockheed have all had major operations here. Today Palo Alto is still a major technology hub and companies such as Facebook, Photobucket, Hewlett-Packard, Genencor and others still call Stanford home.

zChris' Palo Alto

by zChris

I visited Palo Alto in conjunction with my trip to San Francisco. We met an architectural photographer, a friend of ours, at his offices near Japantown and he agreed to show us around, on the condition that he needed to scope out some locations in Silicon Valley. In actuality, we wound up visiting some very unique and interesting dormitories on the immense 800 acre campus of Stanford University, as well as touring the school's more famed areas, including (no joke) the Bill Gates Technology Centre. Stanford's campus was as mesmerisingly gorgeous as it was incomprehensibly huge, and we became lost several times while driving around, at one point emerging into what turned out to be a pedestrians-only plaza crowded with Chinese students participating in a summer programme of some sort. The town of Palo Alto itself was very preppy, upmarket, as Silicon Valley had taken a tumble at that point but nothing near the brutal beating it would receive in the stock markets following 11 September 2001, less than a month later. The drive down along Interstate 280 was very appealing, gliding along past the mountains of the coastal ranges shrouded in fog and emerging into gloriously warm and sunny Palo Alto. Route 101, the return highway, was unfortunately far less picturesque- it was lined almost entirely by low-slung industrial complexes hosting dot-com and high tech firms.