Sunnyvale and Mountain View

Originally a stagecoach stop on the Peninsula for travelers between San Francisco and San Jose, Mountain View’s technology certainly has evolved in the century and a half since its founding. Castro Street is the main downtown area, where bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and boutiques are frequented throughout the day. The iconic heart of the city, though, is out toward the Bay, where Internet giant Google’s sprawling campus and headquarters are located. It’s located right next to the Shoreline Amphitheatre (a popular concert venue) and the NASA Ames Research Center that opened in 1939, three decades before Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Mountain View’s neighbor is Sunnyvale, which is a quaint downtown stretch on Murphy Avenue by its Caltrain station but other than that is a quiet suburb with lots of tech company office parks. Together, these two cities are often considered the center of Silicon Valley since they reside in the geographic middle of the region.