The Hunt for the Mythical GooglePlex!

While travel is generally not required for my job, I’ve been asked to spend a few weeks on the west coast working with a company. Last night, after a day of meetings my coworker and I decided it’d be cool to check out the area, travel up through the Bay Area and finally relax; this means trying to not recognize how tired we truly were from the jet lag.

Well, in an attempt to completely geek out we thought, “LET’S FIND GOOGLE”! So, I whip out my trusty Samsung i760 running Windows Mobile 6 to look this bad boy up. In a complete, and probably often used, pun he states, “Lets use google to _find_ google”. I open up my browser and head to Google Maps. Much to my dismay, it doesn’t work. I wish I could take some screenshots, but I left the cable to install software to my pda at home. Anyway, so what do we do next? Yahoo maps. No go. At this point we’ve traveled far past where we need to be and my last resort was to try MapQuest.

I bring up MapQuest and it seemed quite a bit more promising. Mind you, this was after we found the actual address to GooglePlex in Wikipedia. I punched in the location to MapQuest and again, the same problem. So, I start thinking about how we could get to GooglePlex. My next thought was to just get a set of written/printed directions whether we had the map or not. So we grab the streets of the intersection and get the directions. To make it easier for me to read I sent them to myself in an email and just grabbed my email in pop3 from gmail.

After we turn around and head back towards the other direction we find the streets we had to and finally approach GooglePlex. Woot! I have to say that I was fairly impressed. The place is just huge. I guess they have some funding that allows for it…just a hunch. So anyway, you can check out the picture on my Flickr account. It’s of the sign outside the building. While I wanted to get a closer shot of the building and front entrance, I didn’t want to be “that guy” who ran into Google screaming like a fan child. Therefore the whole experience was kind of “meh” as it was just a building, with some color, and a sign. But, the fun never ends.
So, after about 2 hours of driving and hunting for Google we decide we are hungry and going to head back out on the road to find some grub. It just so happens that if we had originally driven about 2 more miles we’d have reached an exit off the freeway for Google!!! No need for Google maps, Yahoo maps, MapQuest, email, my phone, etc…Just straight up patience. Oh well, the lesson has been learned. BRING IT ON Apple!

>=D