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.