Irrelevance Glorified

Back in February, my Mom visited me for a week, and we did a bit of traveling around. Now, February isn’t the best time to visit the Bay Area. In general, it’s pretty rainy, and this week didn’t disappoint — it rained most days. However, we soldiered through and still did things.

First, we went up and visited wine country. The two most obvious choices in the Bay Area are the Sonoma and Napa regions. Napa is the more well-known, more expensive, and more pretentious valley, while Sonoma is more up and coming. So Sonoma it was. However, the wine tasting would have to be more about ambiance rather than actual, you know, wine, because I would be driving and my Mom is a tiny person who rarely drinks. Because of this, I didn’t care about maximizing the number of places we visited, and cared more about doing things that seemed interesting. Hence the visit to Korbel, with pictures below. Also, since I’m an idiot, I forgot my camera, so all I did was take a few pictures with my cell phone.

The next weekend, we went down south to San Simeon to visit Hearst Castle, at my Mom’s request. Incidentally, this visit was the 2nd in a two-hundred-something part series entitled “Better Know a California State Park.” Part One occurred during Yusuke’s visit back in December, when we visited elephant seals at Año Nuevo.

So, hit the jump for more pictures (and explanations), hit the Flickr set for pictures at the source, or just hit the “play” button below if you’re lazy.

 

 

Here is the outside of the Korbel champagnery in Guerneville, California (basically, Sonoma Valley). They give free tours and it’s a little bit different than the typical wine-tasting tour, so I went there with my Mom when she visited me.

 

Korbel did not initially get into making booze. At first, he did lumber.

 

After entering the Korbel facilities, we first went down into a mini museum that was dedicated to Korbel’s first job, lumbering. These racks are filled with empty bottles, basically just serving as a fancy wall.

 

During the tour, we walked through a massive array of oak casks. Many champagnes spend some time in casks, to allow the oak to impart it’s special flavor to the wine. These casks have actually been here to song that their wood has nothing left to give up, so they are mostly just used for storage.

 

This gigantic bottle of champagne was one of a series made for the arrival of the new millennium. To get an idea of the size of this bottle, you can see a normal bottle of champagne in the metal bucket on that cart. Sadly, this champagne is well past it’s prime, so if we were to pop this one open, it would taste strongly of vinegar.

 

The weekend after going up to Sonoma, I took my mom to Hearst Castle, in San Simeon. Here we are, just starting the tour. The craziness has yet to begin.

 

Randolph Hearst owned a whole bunch of land all along the California coast, but he picked San Simeon to build his special place. The castle is built on a hill that commands vast views; here, Mom poses with the view to the West and the ocean.

 

Wow, Hearst had a pretty impressive place! Except that’s not the main residence. That’s one of the guest houses, Casa Del Sol. That’s just how he rolled.

 

It took a couple of attempts, but finally Hearst built a outdoor pool that he was satisfied with.

 

One of the amazing and appalling things about Hearst Castle was the way Hearst incorporated art from all around the world. I’m not sure what here is authentic and what is fabricated, but at the least that portico — is that the word? — at the far end of the pool is authentic and antique. Many other elements were made to match it. At least he didn’t turn it into a water slide or something.

 

Hearst inherited a lot of wealth from his father, who bought up a lot of land between Monterey and San Simeon. That little bit of adjusted picture is (I think) Silver Peak, one of the few snow-capped mountains we saw in February. It’s about as far as you can see from Hearst Castle, and at the time, it was still within his domain. I may be making stuff up, but I also think that peak was the water source for the mansion.

 

This is one of Hearst’s guest houses; this one held four rooms all with markedly different styles. Many different celebrities and VIP’s stayed with Hearst from time to time. He loved being the host.

 

This is the first guest room we entered in the door. Each of the four rooms in this guest house were furnished in a different style. The lights were turned down to reduce the damage to the decor, so all the pictures I’ve taken here are a bit blurry. I was intrigued by the ornateness of the ceiling.

 

This is one of the other rooms in this guest house. Note I always say "this" guest house, not "the" guest house. Because there were at least 3 guest houses, although this is the only one we were allowed into on this tour. As I mentioned in the previous picture, each room had it’s own style and furnishings, including chests, cabinets, and beds. Here’s a picture of a chest that I thought looked particularly ornate.

 

I don’t know if Hearst even supplied clothing to his guests, but for whatever reason in this room there was some clothing laid out on the bed. Maybe for that "lived in" feeling?

 

After going through a loop of that guest house, we made our way to the courtyard in front of the main building. Of course, I forgot to change my color balance back to ‘sunshine’. Stupid me.

 

As I mentioned before, Hearst loved traveling, and he loved collecting art. These are four statues of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, the deity of war and battle. Dating back to 1350 -1200 B.C.E., they are the oldest things on The Hill. Note : only the statues themselves are ancient; everything that is built around it was fabricated and designed to match it.

 

This is the front door to Casa Grande, the main building and residence of Hearst himself. As usual, pieces of purchased art from Europe have been incorporated into the doorway structure. Also, I believe that the view through the doorway looked directly into a gigantic fireplace at the far end of the foyer; the door was positioned and sized to provide just sort of a view.

 

This mosaic is placed right inside the entrance to La Casa Grande.

 

After coming through the main entrance, one finds themself in the Assembly Room, a giant room appropriate for mingling and socializing. Those tapestries? Authentic, probably Flemish or something. Hundreds of years old. Those wooden panels on the walls? Actually, those are quasi-pews from old monasteries. They had a folding seat that I guess monks could use. One of those panels is actually a "secret door" that leads to the dining room. Even the ceiling was ‘authentic’; Hearst had bought it in Europe and had it shipped to California, eventually becoming a part of this home.

 

I have to admit, ‘Refectery’ is a new word for me (and the Firefox spell check dictionary). I would just call it a dining hall. There is a gigantic wooden table, tons of silverware, and tapestries lining the wall. I imagine it was tough luck if something you wanted was at the other end of the table.

 

I hope that the theme of this dining hall was supposed to harken to a medieval banquet, because that’s exactly the sort of image it conjured up for me. The ceiling is probably imported, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those flags were authentic and represent real crests of real noble families.

 

In addition to the outdoor pool, there’s this indoor pool as well. All the surfaces were mosaic, with inlaid gold accents.

 

Through some sort of optical illusion, this pool looked sloped from one end to the other, but apparently it is pretty deep all the way through. I don’t recall the smell of chlorine in this area, so either my memory is faulty or they have some real awesome filtration system.

 

You can’t drive all the way up to the Hearst Castle. Or at least, you can’t. You park in the Visitor’s Center, then walk in and past all the gift shop and food court and IMAX-like theater stuff to get to the buses which take you up to the hill. From the parking lot, though, the distance and elevation of the Castle is impressive.

 

On the way up to Monterey from San Simeon, we passed a few places where there were large crowds of people. It was still elephant seal season, so I guessed (correctly) that there was some wildlife ogling going on. Here are a bunch of male elephant seals of various ages, just relaxing on the beach and soaking up the sun. I’m pretty sure they’re relaxing and not all dead or something.

 

The next day we went up to San Francisco and visited Golden Gate park for a little while. For reasons unknown to me, there was some sort of stick fest going on. I’m guessing that the trees in this picture (near the Science museum) just dropped all those sticks, and thus people were compelled to construct things. Some of the structures were impressively complex.

 

Another picture of some impromptu stick structures.

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