Day 21: A CASTLE!

So today is the big day--the day we arrive in San Francisco. Before that trip, however, we spent the morning and afternoon hanging out with our friend Sam J, who is always well-dressed and highly photogenic:

After grabbing breakfast near the waterfront, we headed over to Heart Castle. William Randolph Hearst, like Henry Ford, appears to have been both insanely wealthy and maybe a little bit insane. Basically, William Randolph Heart's father was a silver miner who struck it rich and married a 19 year old school teacher (at least as the introductory IMAX movie portrayed her, she appeared to be a gold digger, thus Hearst's perfect match!) and they produced young William. When young William was old enough to appreciate it, the whole family made a year long grand tour of Europe, where young William became obsessed with castles and European art.

For many years, this caused no problem, until his dad died and left him the space on which he built Hearst Castle. Perhaps in a fit of grief, he lost all moorings and decided to build himself a castle on a hill. (Okay, they didn't say that he went crazy with grief. I made that up.) Anyway, he then spent the next 28 years working with an actual architect to design and build his castle, trying things over and over again (apparently the massive Neptune pool was redone three times) until he was satisfied (or worn out).

After designing the castle, William Randolph Hearst would invite over celebrities (this place is quite close to LA, after all) to weekend with him, and then he would basically make all the rules like when dinner would be, and he'd even ask people to create impromptu plays for him, with an hour's notice and a costume closet. Doesn't it sound like a great place to be invited?  After Hearst died, he actually willed the estate to UC Berkeley to be run as a museum, but they turned down the bequest because they didn't think they could afford to maintain it, so the state runs it now.

Anyway, we did the 'grand rooms' tour, which basically amounts to seeing the enormous parlour with hundreds of years old art thrown together in kind of a mishmash, the dining room, which appears to have extremely uncomfortable chairs but multi-hundred year old ceilings, the billiards room and the theater. My main takeaway is that Hearst Castle is not a place I'd want to live--way too stuffy, not enough light, and you've got this old coot telling you what to do all the time. However, it was cool to visit!

In addition to the castle, by the way, there's plenty of stuff at the grounds we didn't get to visit...three "guest cottages" each of which is a few thousand square feet; other parts of the house (the whole thing is about 60,000 square feet) and the cattle ranch--of course there's a cattle ranch.  However the really insane thing about Hearst Castle isn't the size, it's just the crazy decor which is a melange of artifacts and recreations of artifacts from all eras and places and whatever Hearst thought looked cool.

The grounds, by the way, are much nicer; lots of pretty flowers and there's way more sun and light. (I'm sure the interior would have had more light had it not contained so many precious objects d'art.) Sam J was able to give us a bit of a tour of the area based on having visited a few times in the past and told us about all the cool events for donors where guests are allowed to do things like swim in the pool.  We also spoke to a docent, who told us that technically you aren't supposed to eat the fruit on the trees, but...  Unfortunately the only fruit trees we walked by were lemon trees, which would have been less than the tastiest.

Below: the cocktail lounge.  I'm not really sure about the choice to decorate a cocktail lounge with all this 17th century religious art, but I guess Hearst liked it.

The dining room.  On the wall: 16th Century Flemish tapestry.  On the table: containers of Heinz ketchup, French's mustard, and paper napkins.  According to the docent, paper napkins were actually more fashionable than cloth during the early 20th century because they were considered more hygenic.

The indoor pool 

Detail of flooring next to the pool

Stairs into the pool

More indoor pool

Detail of patterns inlaid to garden steps

The Neptune pool

After Hearst Castle, we said our goodbyes to Sam J, and headed up HW1. HW1 is quite beautiful, but I didn't have much time to look around because I was busy avoiding falling off steep cliffs.

Day 20: LA Woman

So last night we failed to reach LA because it was just too darn dark, and I was tired of driving. So we stayed in the little town of Victorville, population 110,000. If you're counting, that's probably the third largest city we've stayed in since we left Boston (the largest would be Salt Lake City, population 183,000 or so). (Alex thinks I am cheating on this number since we stayed in suburbs of Minneapolis and Detroit.)

Victorville is a fine place, I'm sure, but our main goal was to get to LA in time to meet up with a couple of friends, Seth, Chelsea and Chelsea's boyfriend, Dan. We got lunch at Home, a restaurant in Los Feliz, where Seth lives. Their menu includes such marvels as Red Velvet Pancakes. Which I ordered. I wasn't smart enough to take a picture of them, but here is a picture of a stack of pancakes, so all you need to do is imagine that they are red:

We had an awesome time, and we learned that everyone at the table likes Arrested Development, but only Chelsea, Alex and I are Buffy fans. (We are working on Seth though. Dan appears to be a committed slayer hater.)

We also discussed various things to do in LA, although I think Seth most perfectly summarized the ideal itinerary in an email the day before:

As for quintessentially LA things to fit in one day, I suggest you get a weed card, get fake tanned, and buy an entire wardrobe of Ed Hardy clothes.  If you don't leave here with a sweater with a rhinestone dragon on it, you have not experienced LA.

Sadly, we fell back to the secondary itinerary, which was to go to The Getty museum (driving to it along Mulholland drive, on Dan's suggestion, was quite fun except for the terrifying part where a car from oncoming traffic came through a blind curve in the middle of the road at about 30mph in a 10mph zone; thankfully, he missed.  Mulholland Drive is narrow and windy, not unlike Needles Highway in South Dakota.  On the one hand, there are no switchbacks or tunnels on Mulholland, although on the other nobody is street parking pink Land Rovers on blind curves on Needles). Here's a picture from Wikipedia that was taken from Mulholland drive. It didn't look quite like this when we drove it:

After reaching the Getty, we discovered that it was about as intimidating as a national park--there's even this special tram you have to take to get to the museum from the parking garage half a mile away--and the museum itself is kind of big.

So we started out with the Getty orientation film, hoping for some guidance. It turns out that the sole purpose of the orientation film appears to be convincing visitors that the Getty is AWESOME. Sample topic: that the Getty promotes art preservation around the world. (Not how they promote it; just that they do.)

After watching the video, I suggested that we could leave, secure in knowing that the Getty was AWESOME, and what more could they want us to take away from the museum?

Instead of leaving, we went to a bizarre photography exhibit titled "Herb Ritts: LA Style", which included an entire section on celebrity photos. We immediately decided that this was a quintessentially LA experience and went through it. Sadly, photographs weren't allowed, so I can't show you any of the photos. Just assume they were great.

Alex was a bit annoyed at the amount of time I spent looking at the fashion photos in the exhibit (which, for the life of me, I couldn't tell were fashion photos), but probably the best was the daguerrotype of some random celebrity that included a quote from the photographer to the effect of, photography hasn't gotten any better since the 1840s. (The daguerrotype is good at detail, not so good at being easy to look at.)

We also spent some time looking at the impressionist art, including these lovely pieces:

Perhaps the best part of the Getty was the cactus garden:

How cool are those little ball cacti?

We also discovered that the Getty museum is coated in travertine:

Do you remember where we saw travertine before? If so, good for you. If not, here's a hint: it's an 11 letter word for the most famous national park in the US.

But that wasn't the only thing it had in common with Yellowstone, as the Getty appears to have some wildlife and geothermal activity:

The geysers below were surprisingly active!

as well as trenchant commentary on the state of open source (ok, Yellowstone didn't have that)

After getting dosed on art, we headed out for San Luis Obispo, where we are staying at the motel owned by the parents of our friend Sam J. We took HW 101 and, sometimes, HW1. The drive, after leaving the rather terrifying LA traffic, was quite beautiful, with lots of lush green trees, palm trees, agricultural elements and more.

Day 19: Waking up in Vegas

Wait, what did we do in Vegas? I don't remember...

Okay, okay, just kidding I do remember. Actually, most of our time in Vegas wasn't spent doing vegasy stuff, partially because I am severely allergic to casinos and partially because we didn't have the time.

The only time we went into an actual, real live place of sin was to get breakfast at Mon Ami Gabi, on the recommendation of our friend Jen, where I had a tasty eggs florentine (aside from a little mixup on the part of the wait staff about onions...)

Oh, Alex liked the sky-painted onto the ceiling of the casino, so here is a picture:

But really, no trip to Vegas would be complete without going to the National Atomic Testing Museum! where one can learn fascinating facts about nuclear testing.

For example, did you know that it took years before the folks in charge of our atomic stockpile realized that side-explosions could trigger nuclear weapons? They only found out when one supposedly zero-yield test of an explosive near a nuclear bomb triggered a 4 kiloton explosion. Oops. After that, they started doing safety tests. Can you believe these guys managed to make an atomic bomb, but didn't build one that couldn't be accidentally set off?

I also learned that viewing atomic tests became a tourist attraction in Vegas and folks would get up early in the morning--around 5am--in order to watch. They'll make anything into a show in Vegas!

Another entertaining story is the rivalry between Livermore labs and Los Alamos. The Livermore folks, led by Edward Teller, wanted to push forward and produce an H-bomb, and tended to have a more carefree attitude about things. The Los Alamos folks were a bit more by-the-book and concerned about the consequences of the research. This led to a bit of a rivalry when the two labs split. On Livermore's first nuclear test, Ruth, the explosion fizzled and failed to even destroy the tower on which the bomb had been placed:

Los Alamos responded with the note: "Next time either build a bigger bomb, or use a smaller tower". (Some day this is going to come up in a Google search for someone looking for the exact quote, and they're going to think that's it. It's not. I'm quoting from memory, and the only thing more fallible than memory is ... well, I forget what it is. Anyway, Google search person, please do not use this blog as the source of a verbatim quote. Thanks!)

Alex's favorite part was a clothing catalog from JC Penny's.  The government wanted to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on as realistic a scenario as possible, so it constructed houses with mannequins and then bombed the heck out of them, carefully documenting the house and inhabitants before and after the attack.  JC Penny's contributed the clothing to this experiment and provided a fashion catalog for the bomb-savvy customer.

Another fun exhibit was on the Plowshares program, which attempted to find peaceful uses for nuclear weapons. Let's just say that if you think fracking is bad for the environment now, you probably wouldn't at all be a fan of attempts to mine natural gas via nuclear explosions in the 1970s.

If you don't get a participation certificate for your work on a nuclear test, really, it might as well have never happened:

While the museum was interesting, it was also a bit biased.  Radiation exposure wasn't discussed much at all, and the general tone about radiation taken by the employees of the testing sites interviewed was, "well, maybe some of us are getting cancer, but it was worth it to protect the free world."  I guess those with a dissenting view may not be around to express it.

There were lots of other things I learned about nuclear tests, but you probably don't want to know all of them. Instead, you should go to the museum and learn all about nuclear tests yourself.

Our next (and, spoiler alert, final) tourist stop for the day was Hoover Dam. It turns out that Hoover Dam is really big. It's so big that I really couldn't get a good photo of it:

We took the Dam tour, which gave us a view of both the power plant and a chance to go into the dam itself. It turns out that when the dam was build, nobody was really sure it would work, so they did what any good engineer would do: they put in lots of safety margin and massively overbuilt it (by like 70%) and they added monitoring so they could see if there were problems. In this case, the monitoring consisted of tunnels in the dam where they could measure cracks and changes/movement of the structure over time. In the dam tour, we got to go into these tunnels. 

As it turns out, going into these tunnels feels a lot like going inside a very large, cramped, poorly lit concrete building. We did get to take some pictures by sticking our phone outside an air vent on the face of the dam:

The main cool things we learned at hoover dam are:

1) It's a giant arch--everything is held together by water pressure

2) it took almost as long to build the water diversion infrastructure that let them pour the dam as it did to build the dam itself (19 months vs 23 months)

Oh, and apparently the rated lifetime of the dam is 1500-2000 years, as the cement degrades under its own pressure (and that of the water). Guess they'll be a year 4K problem that involves lots of water.

Although 96 men died building the Hoover Dam (this only counts those who died on site...if you made it to the hospital, you weren't counted, so the real death toll is a lot higher) none are buried in the dam.  This dog, however, is buried right next to it.  I wouldn't want to be the guy who ran over the mascot:

After seeing Hoover Dam, we grabbed a quick dinner and headed for LA. 

Despite being lovers of cats, we didn't visit a cathouse, so we didn't take any adorable cat photos for you. Instead, we found one on the internet:

Day 18: Zion

We started off our day bright and early with a ranger-led shuttle tour of the canyon.  So, first of all, Zion was named that by the Mormon settlers.  A couple of them settled in the park and tried farming watermelons and stuff.  It turns out that Zion is a crappy place to build a farm.  While the vegetation looks lush around the Virgin River that runs through the canyon, that immediate area is one of the very few parts of the desert here with any water, and it's nearly impossible to use it as a water source for crops because of the flash floods that rip through it 15 times a year or so, drowning your crops and destroying your irrigation tunnels.  So after a while all the settlers left. (I thought this is what happened with Orderville, pop. 596, which I mentioned way back in the SLC post, but as it turned out Orderville died because the church lost interest in the whole co-op thing, plus the Orderville population refused to give up on polygamy and got arrested.)  In fact, sometimes the water gets so high that it completely washes out the main road.  Anyway, this is not the first time on the trip we've noticed a correlation between land being totally useless for farming and land becoming a national park.  The park materials really stressed the irony of "Zion", a place of refuge, being a lousy place to live.  We learned on Wikipedia that the park was originally called Mukuntuweap but renamed because the park service thought nobody would go someplace with such a funny name. 

Ironically for being in a desert and all, the park is full of Cottonwood trees, which require huge amounts of water.  They have these cottony seeds, sort of like milkweed, and the air near the main road is completely full of them--they blow through the bus, clump on the edges of lawns, they're everywhere.

The other omnipresent form of wildlife near the roads is tent caterpillars, which are gyspy-moth-like in their ability to completely encompass and destroy a tree.  Guess it's pretty clear how they got the name...

Another thing we learned on the tour was that deer in the park, while not afraid of people, are apparently terrified of turkeys.

As we heard many times, Zion is part of the Colorado plateau that was once a lake, and, at other times, a desert.  Some of the rock formations are the result of fossilized lakebed; others come from sand dunes collapsing under their own weight.  We also learned a bit more about how arches form--rock weakens not just due to frost heaving, but also due to calcium carbonate leaching out of the rock, due to pH changes (the ranger didn't say whether this would be in high or low pH conditions...but I assume low).


Below: "arch embryos"!

One thing I learned about that I was not expecting was the life of a ranger!  Apparently most ranger jobs are seasonal, since the parks are far more busy in the summer; full-year jobs are highly coveted and generally reserved for the most senior rangers.  So a lot of rangers find themselves rangering from May to October and then waiting tables or something in the winter.  The jobs themselves are season by season, so rangers who want to advance professionally can find themselves hopping from park to park each year.  Sounds like a difficult lifestyle.  I also noticed that the staff selling food and stuff in the park appear to be on J-1 visas, which is the first actual legitimate use for the visa program I've heard of (more people have probably heard of this one).

The big hike that Zion is known for is Angel's Landing: it includes a portion on a ledge that's 3 feet wide and 800 feet above the ground.  Another cool-sounding hike in the park is the Narrows, which is 16 miles long and mostly down a river, requiring hikers to swim park of the way.  We opted to skip those particular hikes and instead went on a few drier less elevated ones, Weeping Rock and Lower Emerald Pool.  Both of these are places where snowmelt from the mountains collects and drips down onto the ground, resulting in some very refreshing splatter and lots of plants and animals...including canyon frogs, which are incredibly loud considering their size--they sound like sheep.  We even saw one in person!

Lower left: frog

Weeping Rock

Below: Plants growing out of the ceiling that water is dripping from

Pretty wildflowers on the way to Emerald Pool

Emerald Pool

Pretty rocks caused by sand dunes being compressed

Also on the hike we saw one of the much-discussed rockslides in person.  Fortunately ours was just a little fist-sized rock bouncing down the hill in front of us, but a ranger told us about a time when another ranger almost got smushed like a pancake on one of the park's most popular trails.

We saw this stink bug, which was courteous enough to demonstrate its stink-bombing posture.  The ranger assured us that most of the time it's just faking it, since it saves up the bomb for real predators.

After Zion, we hit the road for Vegas, which it turns out has drivers even worse than Boston's and definitely the worst of anywhere we've been on our trip. The strip was all lit up and very pretty, and our hotel had the requisite drunken newlyweds.