About Fremont, California

Fremont, California is a city of 188,000 inhabitants located 42 miles southeast of San Francisco, in Alameda County. Fremont anchors the eastern leg of a triangle framing Northern California's "Silicon Valley," with San Jose to the south and Palo Alto to the west.

Fremont's climate is warm: 70-95 ° F in summer, and 35-70 ° F in winter. Palm trees and pine trees thrive in the same yards. Snow appears on top of Fremont's Mission Peak (elevation: 1800 feet) several days in January of some years.

Fremont is 90 square miles, almost twice the area of San Francisco. Fremont is connected to San Francisco by the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rapid rail system; the commute to the center of San Francisco is 40 minutes by BART. Fremont is also at the confluence of two major freeways. US 880 connects Fremont to Oakland and San Francisco to the north and San Jose to the south. US 680 connects Fremont to Sacramento in the east and the "backbone of the San Francisco Peninsula" (US 280) in the west.

• Within a half-hour driving radius:
  • Headquarters of Hewlett- Packard, Apple Computer, Sun
  • Microsystems, Oracle, Silicon Graphics and all of Silicon Valley
  • Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, California
  • State Universities at Hayward and San Jose.
    
    
• Within a one hour driving radius:
  • San Francisco's Financial District, Chinatown, North Beach,
  • Fisherman's Wharf
  • The Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island
  • The beaches of the Pacific Ocean
    
    
• Within a two hour driving radius:
  • Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur coastline
  • Napa and Sonoma Counties--- the wine country
    
    
• Within a three hour driving radius:
  • Gold Country, where gold was discovered in 1848 and the
  • settlements of the "Fourty-Niners" who came to California to mine gold.
  • The Sierra Nevada Mountains, Lake Tahoe, and the ski resorts
  • Yosemite National Park
  • The Redwood Empire (northern California coast)

Special Attractions for Montessori Students and Teachers in Fremont
Opportunities for elementary student field trips and going- outs in Fremont include (within a ten minute walk) a early California mission and museum, a local history museum, an art gallery, a junior college and its library. Within a ten minute drive, there is a mountain top with a panoramic view of all of San Francisco Bay (often with golden eagles soaring overhead); a Bay-side salt marsh teeming with life, and where salt is harvested by solar evaporation; an auto factory and factories where computer chips and computer systems are manufactured; Alameda County's Main Public Library; Fremont's Niles District, where the movie industry began before it later relocated to Hollywood. The Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, NASAs Ames Research Center (wind tunnel), the Stanford Linear Accelerator (atom smasher) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium are within easy driving range of Montessori School of Fremont.

A view of Lake Elizabeth at dawn from the Lake Elizabeth Park Vistor Center, overlooking Lake Elizabeth with the Fremont Hills and Mission Peak in the background. Lake Elizabeth is the centerpiece of Central Park, located in the heart of Fremont off of Paseo Padre Parkway.

Montessori School of Fremont is the first Montessori school anywhere to be connected to the Internet by @Home, a cable modem service that allows the downloading of images and data many times faster than by telephone connections. The children visit world wide web destinations instantaneously with great clarity. Fremont is a pilot city for the @Home project.