Last week, before the holiday, my wife and I took a little trip to San Simeon, CA. It is a very small place on the coast about half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It's main claim to fame, of course, is the Hearst Castle. William Randolph Hearst's parents lived in this area and became quite wealthy when gold was discovered in the area. Then Hearst managed to make a couple bucks himself and he decided to buy land around the California coast that he loved and to build a little country place.
These days the Hearst Castle has been turned over to the state of California. There are various tours you can take and we took the simplest, the Grand Rooms tour. Most of the tours are 70 minutes long and cost $30. Our tour started outside then we got to view the swimming pool, a main room, a dining room and a pool room. The visit starts at the visitor center down at the bottom of the mountain. You park your car and are loaded into a bus and driven the 5 miles up the mountain. Then you get out and meet your guide.
You start with a nice little climb up various stairs to get to the front door. On the way you pass a couple of 2-3,000 square foot guest cabins that have been used for various visitors back in the day. Here's the front entrance.
Looking the other direction you see they had a pretty fine view of the world!
This is a closer view of the front door. The photo doesn't do the gold color of the door justice.
We didn't get to try the front door though, we went through a little side entrance. They don't want people touching things and that door would be getting a lot of handprints if it were used! We headed directly for a room that was just a 'living room'.
That's our guide on the far right. There were modern carpets on the floors that we were supposed to stand on and there were a couple of guide helpers to keep an eye on us visitors. The next photo shows the inside of the front entrance; all gold leaf.
The picture above is of the stone work above the fireplace. Of course there was a fireplace in every room. The smallest one we saw was about 6 feet wide by 4 feet tall. With stone work all around, of course.
This is the dining room.
I was standing in front of a fireplace and, though you cannot see it, there was another at the other end of the room. We also got to see the outdoor swimming pool.
There was also an indoor pool for those cold winter days. So that was our tour of the Castle.
We were staying in a motel that was right on the beach so that was fun. It is a dog friendly place and at least 50% of the visitors had a dog! It was pretty amazing. The only unfortunate thing was that the shore has about a 10 foot drop to the beach and both of the safe paths to the beach were closed! So getting beach time was going to be difficult. There were many stops along the road, CA-1, where you could get a good vista but again no beach access.
We did eventually find beach access at the William Randolph Hearst Memorial Beach. My wife even got to walk the dog in the water. We were told that Chinese Shar-Pei dogs didn't really like water but our guy took it in his stride. He did kind of hop a bit but he was fine with it.
There is one other thing that is really interesting around San Simeon and that is the Elephant Seal Vista Point. Apparently the female elephant seals come down here with their young about now to moult. Apparently they do not eat while moulting. The males stay up in Alaska eating and getting fatter. Then they come down and moult. Anyway, we got to see the females and the young.
Nope, they aren't dead, they are just losing their fur and some skin. I thought this one posed very nicely.
And this one shows the moult in process!
So that was our four days in California. We did go down to Morro Bay mostly to see the Rock! And we hit Paso Robles for lunch. We managed to avoid all the wineries though! This was taken on the road back from Paso Robles to San Simeon; in the distance you can see Morro Rock. It's an amazing area.
Thanks for stopping by. Keep washing those hands!
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