What to Do While in San Jose

There are actually two Peggy Sue's in San Jose and they are both great.

The theme is 50's diner and they pull it off quite well. There are over sized red booths, checkered floor and juke boxes. The walls are filled with ads and memorabilia from the 50s.

It's American food cooked well and at a cheap price. The place is a little run down and the place needs some work but it is very clean and the staff are friendly.

It's a nice place to go to on a Friday night and worth the price. A whole meal will be under ten bucks.

Golfland is right off of the 680 freeway, the sign is visible from far away so there is no way you can miss this place. It is a mini golf place, but also has a large arcade portion.

There are technically three parts to Golfland. The first building is where you enter, and there are a bumch of kiddie games. Like hitting alligators on the head with a mallot, or getting a stuffed animal with a claw. There is also a small little restaurant type thing inside where you can buy pizza and soda. This portion is geared more to the 12 and under crowd. You can have birthday parties, and eat there too.

The second building is more of an arcade with loud driving and fighting games more suitable for highschool kids.

Outside of the building is the mini golf portion of Golfland. It is a very, very cute mini golf place. It is very family oriented, but at night there is a big young (teens) crowd.

There are not a lot of places like this in the Bay area, but Golfland is great. It is a little old and dirty, but bring some hand sanitizer and you will be just fine.

Ideally, this zoo is for kids. But who does not enjoy a good petting zoo? I know that I loved it the first time I went there (as an adult) and have been back since. It's not a big zoo, and once you have reasonable expectations of what you will find, you will be pleasantly surprised.

The park is off of Senter, a main road in San Jose. There is ample parking for the Happy Hollow Zoo and Park. You do have to pay for the parking, but it's noteworthy to mention that you can also go to the Japanese Friendship Garden form that parking space.

You can spend a good two hours at the park, there are all kinds of animals not just petting zoo animals. There are birds, guniea pigs, a jaguar, meekrats, warthogs, deer and my favorite capybaras (think of a GIANT hamster). The petting zoo is very cute, and the food to feed them is only a quarter.

There is a mini amusement park attached to the zoo as well geared for preschool aged kids. There is a gift job with cute things to buy.

There are lots of kids running around, and it does get busy, but never too busy where your children won't be able to enjoy themselves.

Overall, its a great place to visit!

This an absolutely beautiful place to go. There are several ponds filled with different colored khoi fish, there are benches to sit down, lots of grass, there are bridges to walk over, paths...

At lunch time it is filled with people sitting on those benches or grass to eat their lunch. It is an ideal place to have a romantic picnic, or just spend a nice afternoon.

Once you go past the main entrance, and over the bridge you go through a path and come to another pond (other than the main one) where you can buy food to feed the khoi fish. And boy are they hungry! If you watch the pond for long enough you can even see khoi jumping out of the water. It's great!

There is also a back entrance/exit that you come in through which leads to a park-y kind of place where you can barbecue. It would be a nice area to spend the whole day in if you wanted to go to the adjacent happy hollow zoo and park.

best of all it's free to go in!

I would recommend this museum for parents with very small children, but not as an activity for adults or teenagers. It is mainly used for school groups in the San Jose area, and this is what it should be used for. The part that is accessible to the general public, and not school tours is limited. The walk through of the exhibit took less than one hour, including the time spent at the gift shop.

The coolest thing was the real mummy on exhibit, there was some interesting information, but nothing outstanding.
The museum is open 7 days a week, standard business hours. They also have a planetarium that I was not able to see. There are limited hours for the planetarium, and limited showings. The tickets are free to get in, but it is only while supplies last. So if there is a school tour they reserve the tickets ahead of time and you cant get in. That's what happened to us. If you want to go, I suggest calling ahead of time to try to find when there are the least amount of school tours planned.

The gift shop is small, they have a penny squishing machine which is always fun but there are not a lot of things for sale. There are a lot of Egyptian themed things in the gift shop, but not like little buyable things kids would want (like cups, or toys). There's a lot of grown up things like bookends or clocks.

There is close parking, which is really good. It's just one street away and if you're lucky you can even find closer metered parking. The outside of the museum is very nice. There are a couple of courtyards to have picnics at. The theme of Egypt is continued throughout the grounds. It was not worth the $9 general admission fee to go inside. At a cheaper rate, yes but not at almost ten bucks. To take young kids on a rainy afternoon though, its not bad.

Be prepared to do battle if you go to The Tech. There are always throngs of school groups running around, which makes it difficult to take your own kids there and have them actually enjoy it.

I took my godson there earlier this summer and he was not able to enjoy himself. The lines for everything were very long, and with little teacher supervision most field trip kids run a muck. He was not able to play with a lot of the interactive stuff.

It was nonetheless fun to watch though. There were a lot of interactive stuff to do, and if you were lucky you could get your hands on it.

There was an exhibit where you could put your face into a bugs body and print it out, a machine that would spell out anything you wanted to in blocks, a robot that drew your picture, you could control a Mr. potato head, etc.

Also, you can get a special coded bracelet that lets you interact with the exhibits more. Many exhibits you can take pictures of yourself (experiencing an earth quake or rowing a boat) and The Tech will upload the picture for you to their website, when you go home you can go on the web and print it out! a great, inexpensive moment of your trip.

There are exhibits that all ages can enjoy, but I would say that 10-year olds would have the most fun there. They are old enough to understand what technology is, yet not old enough to be bored. There are also little shows that are put on every few hours that are worth watching.

The Tech also has an imax theatre inside; usually only one movie plays at at time though you can get a better deal if you buy the imax ticket and the entrance together. It's not a lot, but there is a price difference.

The Tech validates parking to a few of the parking garages in the area; you have to walk a few blocks, but parking in downtown San Jose is atrocious anyways so it is worth it.

Despite the bad parking, The Tech is in a good location. There are lots of restaurants nearby to go and eat, and there is a little plaza right across the street with shooting water.