Any hour of any day of the week, a five-minute walk up gorgeous tree-lined Palm Drive towards Palo Alto will bring you or any other lucky visitor to the Cantor Arts Center. It's friendly and free, so if you have an hour or two you'd like to spend being interested and on your feet, step inside and have a look at whatever is showing. However, the best thing about the Museum is actually not in the Museum at all.
The Rodin Sculpture Garden features roughly a dozen of Rodin's brutual and sensual sculptures. One Rodin is never enough. Two Rodins are never enough. Twelve Rodins? Almost enough to see in one day and find your brain full and your outlook changed.
When schoolwork makes me more stressed out than a whale on a see-saw, I head for the sculpture garden in the evening air and get real close to the metal casts of fallen nymphs and shame-headed men, and I get a little perspective. This is real suffering. Writing a thesis is not suffering--swirling eternally in the gates of hell is suffering.
The Gates of Hell is the focal point of the garden. You can take great pictures of yourself in front of it looking wretched, or even bring a sandwich and sit on the benches blasphemously stuffing your face while the starving statues avert their eyes. The garden is also an amazing place to bring a sketch pad and do some studies.
In short, the Garden is amazing. Not counting myself and my boyfriend, the Garden is the best thing on the Stanford Campus. Come day or night to get a breath of something more important than whatever else you could be doing.