Places Along Highway 101 That Demonstrate How Far Technology Has Come
If you’re into US road trips, your bucket list likely includes a jaunt up or down the legendary Highway 101. This iconic road hugs the beautiful, dramatic Pacific coast for over 1,500 miles, with occasional forays inland to take in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Sonoma County and its surrounding vineyards, and the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, a surreal mini desert-scape near the Ocean, among many other scenic and curious places along the way.
San Jose 
A city that has quite an unfair rep as a giant, monotonous suburb for Silicon Valley’s geniuses and drones, San Jose has some hidden charms that make it a worthwhile stop on your drive north. You might be surprised to find, for example, the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, home to various ancient artifacts and mummies, housed in a peculiar and apparently “Egyptian-themed” building dating ‘way’ back to 1966.
As the capital of Silicon Valley, it makes sense that there are plenty of things for techy visitors to get excited about. These include The Apple Park (‘The Spaceship’) and Google Campuses, which are open to tourists, the garage where Steve Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple, and the Computer History Museum, which is an exhibit on developing portable computers and mobile devices.
San Jose is a one-of-a-kind tech hub where you can see first-hand how technology has developed from things like Palm Pilots, which could just about send emails, to the kind of powerful smartphones that can handle anything. Today, many industries exist online; traditional entertainment centers have become digital like online casinos or gaming websites. Hosting a range of online casino games: https://casino.betfair.com/p/live-casino, is a testament to technology’s success.
Sonoma County
Once you’ve left San Jose and wound your way through San Francisco, you’ll find yourself cruising through the beautiful Sonoma Valley. There are plenty of places to stop, vineyards to check out, and glorious wine to taste, but you could easily lose a couple of days there. The vineyards themselves are fascinating, and while wine may symbolize a slow, traditional process, many producers now combine centuries-old winemaking techniques with cutting-edge tech synonymous with California.
Predictable weather conditions are essential for the consistency of vines (and, therefore, the resulting wine), and some Sonoma producers are turning to AI to more accurately monitor their crops, which has far-reaching benefits for the planet: fortune.com/2022/08/23/tech-forward-everyday-ai-california-winemakers/. Other producers are using the technology to identify specific conditions to produce different varieties of wine, pulling data from the vast swathes of source material available online. The beautiful and rustic landscape of Sonoma belies the effect that technology has on the area.
Humboldt Redwoods
Keep on keeping on, and you’ll find yourself in one of the most enchanting parts of the US — the Redwood Highway, which goes through the Humboldt Redwood State Park. There are so many places to stop and marvel at these huge trees, which are some of the largest living entities on Earth, and many are over 700 years old (some can live up to 2,000 years).
To better understand and protect this beautiful forest and others in the region that contain the coast redwood and giant sequoia, scientists completed an ambitious project to analyze and decode their full genetic sequences: projecwww.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/coast-redwood-and-sequoia-genome-sequences-completed. Genetic diversity means that some trees are more at risk of various elements such as drought, disease, and susceptibility to the effects of climate change than others, and this advanced use of genomic technology means that the forests can continue to thrive.
San Jose may be the hub of cutting-edge technology in America, but its influence and the creative ways it can be used stretch up one of the country’s most beautiful and iconic highways. 101 is an amazing drive for the senses and spirit and a testament to technology.
