Visiting San Jose

[UPDATE April 27, 2015: I've deleted my pages about visiting San Jose since they were so obsolete. The web site http://www.sanjose.org/ is a good place to start for any visitor planning a trip to San Jose.]

Back in the late 80's I had an idea to write a visitor's guide for San Jose, and distribute it at local book stores, hotels, etc. At the time, visitor information was only available to visitors from either booklets offered by local organizations promoting their interests or within a few pages of larger visitors guide books covering California or San Francisco. The information offered by local organizations were basically advertisements, and the few pages within the larger tourism books failed to cover what I thought a visitor might enjoy in San Jose.

Granted, San Jose is not a city to which people usually come for tourism, but there are a lot of visitors who come to San Jose for business or family. So my thinking was, if someone is in town for whatever reason, they might find useful a comprehensive guide for visitors which cast a critical eye on what San Jose has to offer.

So I started collecting newspaper clippings about interesting restaurants, shops, points of interest, and more from the San Jose Mercury News and Metro newspapers. Then came the rise of the Internet, and all of the content that came with it. I figured, if my potential market for a visitors guide was limited before, it would probably be even more so now due to all of the information on the Internet.

So, instead of writing a visitors guide, I've created two web pages about San Jose. While my pages are short on content, I think they are very useful because I believe they contain the most comprehensive lists of links to San Jose visitor information on the Internet.