Hearst Castle

We had a great time visiting Hearst Castle on our quick spring break weekend trip to California. We went just to tour Hearst castle, which we've set out to do twice before on longer trips and then balked at the price or the lack of available tours that we wanted to take. Last summer we were there on Labor Day weekend and discovered that making reservations is the way to go to actually get to tour.

What made this time even better was that since we were going just for the castle, it didn't make sense to miss anything, so we took all three daytime tours. That ran up the cost higher than touring the Biltmore mansion, but we felt like we got our money's worth.

We started Friday morning, and after a few stops, (like to see Sara and the kids and drop some things off) we got down to some serious driving and made it to Red Bluff by 8:30pm. Besides reading and napping, I made some use of my time by downloading as many batches of indexing as they would let me and working offline on my little net book on indexing pages of the 1940 census. That doesn't use a lot of power, so the net book was good for as many hours as I could stand to do it. At night before sleeping I used the hotel Internet connection to submit my finished batches and download more in their places. By the time we got home I'd done over 700 names!

We got up early Saturday morning and south to the coast and San Simeon where the castle is. It is north of LA and south of Monterey on the rugged coastline that includes Big Sur. We got there around lunch time and ate and got into our motel, then headed over to the visitor's center. Along the way, shortly before reaching San Simeon I was amazed to see several zebras clustered together, grazing on a hillside. Harry thought I'd mistaken something else for zebras, but there isn't anything you can mistake for a zebra!  Later we heard on tour that there were still zebras grazing the ranch with the cattle, left over from when Hearst used to have all kinds of zoo animals there. So there!

We had reservations for the Grand Rooms Tour at four pm and got to the visitor's center in plenty of time to have a pastry before heading up on our designated bus. Rather than describing, I'll share a few photos:

Front door, embellished with European stonework.

Main Room where guests gathered to visit for Happy Hour



The dining room, the only place meals were served

Hearst called his estate "The ranch at San Simeon" He decided he was too old to keep camping in tents here as he had done since childhood and decided to 'build a little something' so he could visit more comfortably.







He still considered it a camp, even with the lavish surroundings and insisted on general informality. The dishes were his mother's pattern of willow ware stoneware and the ketchup and mustard were served in their jars on the table as they were when he used to camp there.

The billiards room, like every other room, was decorated with beautiful tapestries, art objects, and contained a hundreds of years old ceiling taken from a grand house in Europe. The walls and doorways featured middle eastern tiles.

After seeing the rooms where guests relaxed after dinner with their smokes, we finished up in the full sized theatre where Hearst showed first run movies to his guests, who were comfortable seated in overstuffed armchairs.  We watched a short film of home movies taken of guests enjoying the estate, 'back in the day'.   Next post, The Grounds and gardens.