Off to Cupertino, arriving.

Flying to California from Albany NY needs a layover of course. We stopped into Chicago and made the next leg to San Jose. No issues and for a long flight it wants bad. Getting into California was a bit surreal, lots of mountains and not a lot of trees. Rolling hills of sand and if I remember correctly they were starting to have another drought, and it showed. We got out rental car, something unremarkable, we were off to Oakwood apartments which was exactly 9 minutes from 1 Infinite loop on 280. Well I lied, we went straight for the Apple campus. In awe of being there at the "mother ship" we gawked and strolled around, it was Sunday and there was nothing going on, nobody around. We lingered for a bit, then collectively realized we were kind of tired, we headed to Oakwood. While I don't remember the time of our flights I can say we were at the airport, pre 9-11, and got on the flight pretty fast. There was a layover a few hours in Chicago then off to San Jose. It was early evening and we decided to check into our rooms. Oakwood was more then just hotel, these were apartments! 2 bedrooms, kitchen, 2 bathrooms, living rooms and couches, bit TV pretty much a furnished apartment. It has cooking utensils, stove, microwave, the works. This was surprising since we figured we would be staying in a Holiday Inn, this was not the case these were basically apartment we were staying. Off to get beer and snacks.

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Per Diem

Apple, spare no expense at times, gave us all of $80 a day to eat. I may be wrong, my heart says it was closer to $50 but I don't really remember so we will go with 80. Regardless, we found that we had to have a cheap breakfast and lunch to blow this money on dinner. So here we are, its now late evening, we estimated we were all up at least 18-20 hours to our estimation and have $320 to blow. What I remember is we got some food and wandered to a convenient store and purchased a ton of snacks and a crap load of beer. Ok a LOT of beer and snacks. The great thing is the store had this old register that, on the receipt, just had the final dollar amount and wasn't itemized! Hello expense report! Back to Oakwood, we realized they had a pool and a giant hot tub and a rule of no bottles allowed near the pool. We are there all of 4 minutes and we already got in trouble. Back to the room, we found a Kool-Aid container and filled it with beer, it was plastic so who cares! We closed out the night drinking beer from this picture, awake for over 24 hours, soaking in a hot tub and tomorrow we become… Genius!