Mountain View is a city in the southern San Francisco Bay Area, best known as the home of Google's headquarters, the Googleplex. It sits between Palo Alto and Sunnyvale in the heart of Silicon Valley, and it has the pleasant, slightly dissonant character of a place that was an ordinary mid-century suburb until the technology industry turned the surrounding area into the most economically concentrated stretch of real estate in the world.
The city is small enough to navigate easily on foot or by bike. Castro Street, the downtown spine, runs from the Caltrain station to the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, with a good range of restaurants, cafes, and bars filling the blocks in between. The dining scene punches well above its weight — Vietnamese, Indian, Peruvian, and Spanish restaurants compete for the same lunch crowds, and Chez TJ, in a Victorian cottage a block off the main drag, is one of the better fine-dining rooms in the Bay Area.
North of downtown, the Shoreline area is where Mountain View opens up. The Computer History Museum, at the corner of Shoreline and Charleston, holds one of the great collections of technology artefacts in the world. A couple of kilometres further north, the Googleplex campus sits at the edge of Shoreline Park, where twelve kilometres of bay trails, a sailing lake, and a restored Victorian house occupy land that was landfill forty years ago. The Shoreline Amphitheatre draws major touring acts from May through October.
Mountain View makes a practical and often overlooked base for exploring Silicon Valley. It's quieter and more manageable than San Jose, cheaper than Palo Alto, and well-connected by Caltrain to San Francisco in the north and San Jose to the south.