Day 8: Tuesday: Berkeley, and home

By Tuesday morning we were pretty beat. Woke up to a fog bank covering everything, obscuring what must have usually been a pretty view of the marina next to our hotel, and the San Francisco skyline. Breakfast and a 15 minutes drive up University Avenue to the Berkeley Campus, where we grabbed one of the last parking spots by the Visitor's Center. The folks guaranteed reserved parking spots on campus are the 10 current Nobel laureates on the faculty...their spaces are designated 'NL.'

Our tour guide chided us for showing up on the one day this summer when the sun wasn't shining on Berkeley, but even if it had this would still have had an East coast flavor, right down to the paving stones directly from the walkways of Columbia University. Berkeley was the original University of California campus and the older architecture is patterned after the Ivies, including the huge Life Sciences building which was in competition with its counterpart at Harvard as the largest classroom building in the world...



...the main library, third or fourth largest in the country...



...and buildings whose names we do not know.



The focal point of the campus is the Campanile, or belltower, which is a carillon of 22 bells that are played by students.



No palm trees at all, but a beautiful campus. And wireless Internet access available everywhere thanks to a special grant from Hewlett-Packard.





The tour ended by the Sather Gate, another East coast touch, and the place where Berkeley students started protesting in 1964 to secure free speech on campus, and haven't stopped since.



And with that, our trip ended. All that was left was the drive to the airport and, thankfully, first class service back to Chicago.

An epic adventure.