Best of all is the horseshoe bay of Rondinara and tree-fringed Palombaggia, which you will see gracing postcards all over Corsica.

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It starts as an exit off the Dumbarton Bridge, which cuts across the southern edge of San Francisco Bay, runs though rough-and-tumble East Palo Alto, then tree-lined stretches dotted with multimillion-dollar mansions, and eventually hits, as the name implies, the Stanford campus.

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