Travel Blogs

The Alviso Time Machine.
September 1

It all happened on an ordinary Friday two weeks ago. My team went to lunch at a mexican restaurant in Alviso. I opened up google maps and typed the address in and tried to understand from the map where it was. Then I zoomed out a bit and then a bit more and violla! it was a 7 minute drive from my office on the very same street.

I've never been there before. The farthest I've traveled up that road was to the highway intersection. Imagine my surprise when half a kilometer after the highway, once you pass the high tech office buildings and cross the bridge over a reed-filled creek, you suddenly discover yourself in the 50s!

The place was amazing. The only new thing in it seemed to be the fire station. I came back a week later with a colleague to walk around town and take some photos.

The town, now part of San Jose, stands against what used to be the southern tip of San Francisco bay and is now seasonal tide pools. Surprisingly, there's no development going on in the area. No new houses, no apartment complexes and the for-sale sign on one of the old, boarded up buildings, seemed to have been hanging there for a long time.

The houses that seem to be taken care of look like this:

But a lot of them just look broken down like this:

I liked this car mummification method. The super high-tech particle based self-adhesive material covering the car protects it against the ages. I'm now firmly of the opinion that my own car is squeaky clean!

There were other, less-easily-explained places.

What did "Skin Deep" mean? Was it an old club? Or was this the site of secret experiements and alien abductions taking place long ago and soon to be a major TV show on FOX? Skin Deep(TM) - What's underneath might not be flesh and blood. Mauhahahaha

There are some historical places where the local cannery used to be:

And check out this amazing gate and the concrete road leading to, eh... we apologize for the technical difficulties. It appears the property has been snatched away. Tune in to next week's episode of "Skin Deep(TM) - What's underneath might not be flesh and blood. Mauhahahaha" and see how a whole house could have disappeared. Or did it?

This bird feeder / bath was in the yard of a decorated house (see album for a picture of its front porch).

Speaking of the front porch, we met an actual family sitting on the porch. Yes - just like in the movies. Yes - in California. But it did start to seem like we've stumbled onto a old route 66 town. Especially when a clearly new train suddenly ran through town, leaving it as fast as possible without bothering to stop.

Here's one more relic from the town: