30 Thursday
I went for my early morning walk around the streets near Russell's apartment again this morning before the others got up. Still the initial cloud which burns off about 9 oclock and then gets quite warm. Russell & Novey went to pick up her parents from a flight from Taiwan at 8:15am so Sally and I relaxed a bit in the morning.  We met her parents later in the morning, but only managed a brief conversation with them as they wanted to immediately settle down to catch up on much lost sleep and try and banish the jetlag. We took the opportunity to leave them in peace and went to Frys Electronic Store to enable Russell and Novey to purchase a combined MP3 and CD player which they wanted to play the wedding music.

Fry's Electronic and Electrical Supermarket

I drove under the Russell's direction, it sure makes a difference to not have to worry about navigation. The Frys store is huge. Set out like a giant supermarket and a total floor area of all of West City in Henderson, I found I was standing in the middle of the store just mind blown by the vastness of it all. Anything electrical and electronic - whiteware, blackware, audio CDs, DVDs, computer gear h/w & s/w, phone gear, TVs, Stereos, electonic components, printers, faxes, books and the list goes on. Including a large computer section of every imaginable computer component. Just throw the hard drives, RAM etc into shopping trolleys and trundle up and down the ails. Just like shopping at Woolworths. There were 40-50 checkouts though not all of them were staffed when we were there. Most surprising was the 'returns' line consisting of people returning stuff they had previously bought and either did not want or were dissatisfied with. Apparently a very liberal returns policy, but I later found out that some of the returned stuff can reappear on the shelves. Computer hardware seems cheap compared with NZ prices, but computer software seems expensive. Back to Rock St for lunch and for Russell and Novey to play with their new toy. After a quick snack we went off with Russell to the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto while Novey took her parents to their hotel to settle in.

Looking towards Main Quad - Stanford University

We were lucky in obtaining a park close to the main entrance at Stanford as, despite the huge campus size, car parking seems quite scarce. We strolled around looking at the mix of Romanesque and mission revival style architecture and after a while realised that we could go up to the top of the Hoover tower for $2 for Russell and 1$ each for Sally and I (senior citizens). The lookout at the top of the tower was marvellous, extensive views not only of the whole campus but beyond to fog covered San Francisco City, across the Bay were the two bridges heading to Freemont and south into the murk where San Jose would be. Russell pointed out the huge blimp hangers at the Moffett airforce field close to his place. Back on the ground and we came across a squirrel running around on the grass. Russell's comment, "if you take a photo of that then I'm walking away". Apparently its not cool for tourists to be seen to be embarrassing the local residents.

Memorial church - Stanford University

Memorial Auditorium - Stanford University