The booming computer industry of the early 1980s turned San Jose into a sleek, charmless and smog-blighted community the center of which was col­loquially named ‘Silicon Valley”'(official­ly, it is the Santa Clara Valley), an area associated with pioneering electronics since the 1940s. Within San Jose’s freeway-caged suburbia, however, are two of California’s strangest sights.

No lesser thing than a recreated avenue from the ancient Egyptian town of Thebes serves as the driveway into Rosicrucian Park, 1342 Naglee Avenue, where the Rosicrucian Order maintain the Egyptian Museum, a world-class collection of amulets, mum­mies and other objects from Assyria, Babylon and Egypt.

An equally unlikely find is the Win­chester Mystery House (http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com), 525 Win­chester Boulevard. The house was financed by Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, who believed herself haunted by the spirits of all those killed by Winchester weapons and certain to die if the house were ever completed. Consequently, construction work continued non-stop for 38 years until Sarah’s death in 1921, and resulted in a 160-room house packed with stairways leading nowhere, dead-end corridors, and doors and windows which open on to blank walls. The house is a strange and absorbing place, though one with its atmosphere diluted by a high admis­sion price and far too many commer­cial trappings.

Detour – Mission San Jose de Guadalope

Though it gave its name to the town of San Jose, Mission San Jose de Guadalope stands at 43300 Mission Boule­vard on the eastern edge of the bland residential community of Fremont. Founded in 1797, the mission was the 14th in the Spanish-built chain across California and its intimate interior (greatly benefiting from a $5-million restoration in the 1980s) and small museum provide a taste of the trials and tribulations of the mission era.