Friday, September 7, 2007

Hearst Donut

Full of amazing food from Nepenthe, we set off down Highway 1 again. Just when you thought Highway 1 couldn't become any freaking scarier, it triples in scariness. For the next hour, I'm nervous as hell, Nancy is yelling at me for driving to fast, and I'm inches away from reenacting a scene from Toonses the Driving Cat. This road is so damn creepy it's unbelievable. Every 30 seconds there is a 20 to 30 mile an hour turn, and not one of those 20 to 30 mile an hour turns that you just laugh at in your home town as you roll up on two wheels. These 20 to 30 mile an hour turns will murder you and then hunt down your family.

We were supposed to be at Hearst Castle at 3:20 for our tour, so I was already nervous about missing our time slot. The GPS was telling me that we were going to be late. We roll up around 3:28 and walk into the Hearst Castle main building where you buy your ticket and souvenirs. We have 10 minutes before our bus leaves to go up to the castle.



I didn't think anything could be worse than driving on Highway 1, but taking a bus up an even steeper smaller road trumped it.



Hearst Castle is absolutely breathtaking. It's the house built by the guy upon which Citizen Kane was based, William Randolph Hearst. He was a crazy as hell, insanely rich newspaper tycoon.



Here is the tour guide. He was WAY to happy to be giving us this tour and knew WAY to much about William Randolph Hearst. He scared me.



Now I'm just going to plaster pictures of the place up, trust me, nothing funny happened on the tour and there isn't anything funny to say about the pictures, but they are really cool pictures. Here is the pool in front of the castle. Those are actual ancient roman columns.





Nancy pointed out how pissed off these geese looked.



Here are some more lovely pictures of the place. There were like three guest houses and then the main castle.









So basically Hearst would just buy random works of art, ancient sculptures and antiquities, then just throw them into any open space he had available. The tour guide said the main purpose of the mansion was to house his art collection. I thought this would be a great place to shoot an episode of Trading Spaces.

Living in New York for so long now, I just instinctively gave this statue a quarter.



Here are a couple more pics of the castle.




After our tour we watched an extremely cheesy 40 minute movie about Hearst and his castle. They actually had a theater in the main building where you get souvenirs. I give the film 2 stars.

Next we made our way to our motel. This was the first place we stayed that was actually right next to the beach.



It was our favorite place so far, except the bed was about 100 years old and very uncomfortable. I thought we should have hidden while we were on the tour of the castle and just stayed there.



Next we walk to a little bluff and pointed at stuff for about half an hour.




Then it was down the rickety stair case to the beach.




We wanted to watch the sunset.



We got bored waiting for the stupid ass sun to set, it took so long. Stupid sun.




Finally the sun got off it's lazy ass and set.



Then we drove to the little downtown area and found a quaint little pizza joint. The pizza was really good. Our long day was at a close and it was time to retire to our little motel by the beach.

Tomorrow...... Los Angeles!!!!!!!!!

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