Every other year for the last 7 years, Shawn King of the Your Mac Life podcast has given the Apple faithful a chance to go on a pilgrimage to 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, the location of Apple headquarters.

As part of our continuing coverage of Macworld Expo 2009, Christina Warren and yours truly hopped on the bus along with about 30 other alpha geeks to visit the Mecca of Macdom and pick up some Apple swag at the Company Store. Former TUAW blogger and Realmac Software PR Ninja Nik Fletcher joined to take photos.

I dropped some spendolas on Apple gear, including a logo hat, long-sleeve black mock tee, polo shirt, and three big coffee mugs. C-mac, being the resident TUAW fashionista, bought an Apple notebook (the kind with paper sheets in it), a couple of pens, a navy hoodie, a knit cap, two caps (one knit, one military), and a short sleeve tee.

There were several prize drawings on the ride home, and I won an 8GB blue iPod nano courtesy of a "Secret Santa." Suh-weeet!

It's too late to join this year's Tour de Cupertino, but keep your eyes and ears open before future Macworld Expos to see if Shawn is planning another trip. Check out the gallery below.

Join TUAW as we go on a weekend road trip to Apple's campus at 1 Infinite Loop. No, not really, but we can always take a virtual visit to Apple HQ thanks to Google Maps Street View, now that Google has finally completed their street level photography of Infinite Loop.

This allows you to see the buildings in their full grandeur. Unfortunately, you cannot visit the legendary Apple Company Store. To start your virtual road trip, click here.

A three-alarm blaze drew 60 firefighters to Apple's Cupertino campus on Tuesday night. Specifically, it was in building Valley Green Six at 20705 Valley Green Drive. San Francisco's ABC 7 television news has some video.

Investigators suggested that an air conditioning unit could have been the culprit. Fortunately, all employees escaped unharmed. No word on how much damage was done to the building, although some reports say the smoke damage was substantial.

We're very glad that no one was hurt, and hope the damage isn't too bad.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

And they found ... not that much. There's something not-quite-right about these snapshots purportedly from inside Apple's Cupertino campus. They look like they come from almost anywhere -- despite the plentiful Apple products (and one notable Microsoft natural keyboard), there's no major signs of genius -- no "the crazy ones" posters, iTablet prototypes lying around, or "how to act around His Steveness" employee pamphlets. Could it be that the people who work at Apple are, strangely enough, just like us?

No, surely not. These pictures are also a bit out of date, we're told, as rumor has it that the front lobby always shows off the new products, not the old iMacs. So clearly these snaps are from the late '90s, when the rest of us were using beige boxes and OS 9 to compute, and only Apple employees had the luxury of using thin keyboards and horizontal LCDs gone vertical (madness!) in their super-futuristic office space. There: our worldview is back to normal. As normal as it gets, anyway.

Thanks, Steve!

This might be the Mac-geekiest thing I've ever seen, but this is TUAW, so here you go. Sharp-eyed reader Morgan W has a flickr pool up of signs around the Apple campus in Cupertino, and notes that three of their newest building signs (at Bandley Five, Six, and Eight) have an updated logo with no 3D effect, and use Myriad for the font instead of Garamond, which the old signs used.

Will Apple's stock prices jump around at the news? Probably not. but as Morgan says, just like the missing Open Apple, it's another sign that we're moving further and further away from the "rainbow and serif Apple of yore."

Day two of TUAW's back-to-school giveaway, and today's prize is a red tumbler from the mothership! This food-grade beverage holder is relatively safe from viruses, like your Mac. Unlike your Mac, you should wash it from time to time. Like an iPhone, it is meant to be cradled in the hand. Unlike the iPhone, it doesn't smudge. Then again, you aren't really wiping your ear on a mug, are you? We bought this in January at the Company Store in Cupertino.

Same deal as yesterday: enter by leaving a comment on this post. Again, limited to the 50 US states, you must be 18 and only one entry per person per day, please. Each day we'll open a new post for comments from 5AM-11:59PM. To enter, leave a comment on that post (make sure it appears, check your email). To see full rules, go to our TUAW Back-to-school giveaway page.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's prize: something mightier than the sword.

As AAPL continues to fly, Apple is apparently eating up all the real estate they can find. AppleInsider reports that Apple is going to expand their Austin, TX campus by building an 80,000 square foot building (at 12565 Riata Vista Circle). Apple's not saying what they're using it for, but the Austin Statesman reports that there have been ads floating around for iPhone tech support jobs.

And speaking of Jobs, the man himself apparently showed up in a Cupertino, CA City Council meeting recently, saying that they bought up "every little scrap of building we could find in Cupertino," which makes Apple Cupertino's "largest taxpayer," according to Jobs himself. Jobs shouldn't worry though-- the money is going to a great cause. All this real estate purchasing is funding none other than the self-proclaimed "ranked #1 library in the US: the Santa Clara County Cupertino Library.

Just in time for the iPhone crowds and media to descend on Apple stores around the country, SiliconUser has a quick little history of how Apple's famous retail space came to be. It all started back in 19-aught-7, when Mr. Stevonious Jobsenheimer first opened the Apple Computing Salon and General Store in little Border Junction, Wyoming...

No, only kidding. In 1996 when Jobs came back to Apple, they were struggling to come up with a good way to sell their computers at retail, and after a few bumpy years with store-within-a-stores at CompUSA, they set up a warehouse in Cupertino and went to work designing a real live Apple experience. The first try was apparently based on Apple's product matrix (and caused Jobs to famously say, "Oh God, we're screwed"), but eventually they came up with what we know today-- bright, open spaces with stations that encouraged visitors to use and play with the products. Strangely enough, SiliconUser points out that they are very much like Gap stores, which both disturbs and awes me at the same time.

So when you're standing outside your local Apple store Thursday at midnight while it rains and you stare at the growing-even-more- obsolete- than-it-already-is Treo 650 only to look up at the dry and warm Apple store and the glorious iPhones that lie inside behind the glass, just remember the good folks that designed it all for you. The money they were paid made it worth it, but the irresistible spending draw you feel while walking by is just the icing on the cake.

I haven't watched the keynote yet, and I've been spending most of my time looking through the other new features of Mac OS X Leopard. After I found that non-transparent menubar mod for Leopard, however, I can't get over how hideous that new menubar really is. I also hate to say it, but Apple's secrecy with this UI change until now screams 'Cupertino borrowed one of Redmond's photocopiers' (the new Windows Vista, for those who haven't seen it, contains what many - including myself - consider to be a literally dizzying overabundance of transparent window borders and menus).

Seriously: what is Apple thinking by turning the menubar nearly invisible, but keeping the 'just slightly' translucent aspect and white color of previous menus? I think this looks absolutely dreadful, as it doesn't even look like the menubar and the menus have anything to do with each other anymore, and I'll be damned if Apple takes the actual menus this translucent as well. In fact, if they went that over the edge, I could comfortably say that I wouldn't buy a copy of Leopard until someone developed a modification that switches the menubar and menu back from the brink of "hey look, Vista went transparent!"-ness (of course, a simple Apple-provided checkbox in System Preferences would do just fine as well).

Given Peter Maurer's mod and disinterest in this change surfacing from others, I can only hope that more voice their opinion - whether they do or don't like it - and that Apple listens if it the consensus on this menubar change turns out to be a thumbs down. After all, Leopard still is a developer-only beta, and October is still a long way away.

If you're really bored, or just love a nice corporate campus, this virtual tour of Apple's Cupertino campus will help pass the time. Now I'll warn you that it isn't all that exciting, but you're reading an Apple blog on a Saturday, so what else are you doing?

[via MacSlash]

What better way for a group of tireless Apple code monkeys to relax after a week of hard work than to get smashed on the train ride home? According Drinktrain, not much. Thus, a tradition consisting of just that seems to have emerged from within Cupertino. Most Friday evenings, the last car on the CalTrain from Mountain View to San Francisco can be found chock full of inebriated Apple employees partying it up to such themes as: Chuck Norris Train, Snakes on a Mothaf*ckin Train, and my personal favorite; Mac OS X Pirate Localization Train.

According to our anonymous source, Drinktrain participants get away with their shenanigans due to the fact that there is no open-container law that applies to CalTrain vehicles. By far the juiciest tid-bit of information in the official wiki is the fact that Drinktrain is continuously looking for new blood, even if it comes from those who don't work at the shiny white mother-ship. Who's up for some locomotive lunacy!?

My friend Chris Saribay sent me this link to a video he posted on his blog showing Steve Jobs proposing to the Cupertino City Council a plan to build a second, 50-acre Apple campus. Reuters already reported on this, but it's great to hear it, as Chris writes, "from the horse's mouth." It's very Stevenote-y, with Jobs sporting his usual black turtleneck attire -- except the setting is almost eerie: him standing in front of the council, in an near-empty room.

Definitely worth a watch, if for nothing more than to hold you over until the next official Stevenote.

News.com, never one to shy away from the tough tech stories, took a reporter and camera crew to Cupertino and spoke with residents about what life is like living with Apple HQ in their backyards. The video reveals such shocking details as:

• When Apple employees go to the Outback Steakhouse they eat steak and drink beer (though not an excessive amount)
• You can tell an Apple employee by their Apple badge

I will leave you to discover the other shocking truths when you watch the video (which is sponsored by Microsoft).

Just a quick reminder: There's still plenty of time to enter our latest contest, "Create a Feb. 22 Apple Invite." You know you've got the mad Photoshop skillz, so show off a little. Simply design an invitation to a fictitious Apple press event scheduled for February 22, and leave a link to your entry in the comments of this post. All entries must be received by 11:59 PM EST on February 22nd. Be creative, be clever, be amusing. We've received some really great entries so far, so get cracking.

The winner (announced on Feb. 23rd) will receive the swanky Apple travel mug pictured here, which our own Scott purchased at the Apple Campus in Cupertino during his trip to Macworld in January. Good luck!

Have you ever wondered what it is like to commute to Apple's campus at Cupertino? Neither have I. However, that hasn't stopped Andrew Lin from vlogging his morning commute to the Mothership.

The videos are all in QuickTime (what else?) and they are sped up by 30, so you need not experience the commute in realtime.

[via Valley Wag]