(Warning: I left there in 1985, but have visited often.) There's really not all that much to see in SV proper--it's just a classic suburban sprawl, with tract

(Warning: I left there in 1985, but have visited often.) There's really not all that much to see in SV proper--it's just a classic suburban sprawl, with tract homes intermingled with endless strip malls along El Camino, with occasional high-tech business parks thrown in for good measure, all intermingled around two major north/south highways (280 and 101). If you want to see the source of it all, be sure to visit Stanford. It's truly a lovely campus. And then stroll down University Blvd, where you can pick up a faint vibe of what's going on in the valley. (Facebook (which you don't care about) just left University, but there are lots of other VC offices & coffee shops/restaurants along there full of high-tech folk.) I'd get up on Skyline Drive, above the valley, and get some over-views from there. Beautiful drive as well. Then you might wander over the mountains (if you can stand the traffic) on 17 to Santa Cruz and surrounding areas, which have some great sights. Carmel, down past Monterrey, is a classic California coastal scene, if a rather expensive place to hang out. Worth a trip. Great restaurants, great little beach & cluster of houses around. Then there's SF itself, and the northern scene (Muir Woods, etc.) All worth a few days of poking around (or a lifetime), but there's so much to see and do up there that I couldn't do it justice. I've got a lot of fond memories of the valley, but they're mostly personal (where I used to hang out with my then-fiancée, where we lived (hmm, actually, not all that fond of either house & neighborhood), where I worked at various start-ups, what church I used to attend, etc.). Otherwise, what happens in SV is mostly happening inside somewhat bland office buildings strewn about the valley, and there's nothing really worth seeing in that sense, unless you just want to say you've "been there."