Pacific Coast Highway Drive

Saturday morning had us leaving San Luis Obispo, joining Highway 1, the picturesque Pacific Coast Highway, just at the edge of town. Unfortunately, though, our forecasts didn't tell us anything about the weather system that just happened to hit the central coast overnight Friday, so we drove toward Hearst Castle and San Simeon in heavy clouds and a good drizzle.

Reaching Hearst Castle we were pleased to find that the parking lot was nowhere near full - this was the only tour we had not pre-booked, and we weren't sure of the chances of getting in. No problem; in fact we bought our tickets and headed straight to the bus for the next tour. And you need buses to get from the visitor centre to the top of the 'mountain' the house is built on. Apparently, as this has always been a Hearst family ranch, William Randolph and his father used to ride their horses to the top and camp out - quite a feat since the elevation at the top is about 1,600 feet. When his father passed away, William hired woman architect Julia Morgan (out of the ordinary for 1919) to build him a little something on the hill since he was tired of camping in tents up there.

The problem we had was that we couldn't see anything when we looked down, even when, as the story goes, you get high enough that you break through the low coastal clouds. Well, nobody told the low coastal clouds to get out of the way. It was drizzly and cool and foggy outside the whole time we were there. The only advantage was in the photography: it gave all the pictures an ethereal haziness, almost as though we were walking through a landscape that wasn't quite real.

The 'Casa Grande' or Big House, 69,000 square feet.
Just a little ranch house on a hill....

 

Here and below, two of the 'cottages' on the hill - to go along with
the house that had 115 rooms...

 

Unfortunately, the rules are that you can't publish photos without written permission, so the pictures of the big rooms inside will have to wait for a private showing. We will, however, take the chance on including one shot of the Roman Pool so you can see the level of opulence Mr. Hearst lived in.

 

 We're looking forward to coming back to the area and perhaps seeing this 'ranch house' in more favourable conditions.

As we continued up Route 1, the weather didn't get much better than it had been all morning.

But it was really very strange. The minute we crossed over the Bixby Bridge (the one off in the distance in those recent Chrysler Town & Country ads) the clouds started to part and the sky got blue. This is the very next photo we took:

 

As the sky got clearer, we starting moving away from the coastline a bit, going through some small communities as we neared the Monterey Peninsula. After a stop for lunch at Carmel - not in town but at a shopping plaza on Highway 1 - we finished the trip, arriving at the Hyatt Regency Monterey around 3:30.

Since lunch was fairly late and larger than we had hoped, we decided that dinner was going to be bar nibblies. Because this weekend was the annual Monterey Jazz Festival, the reception staff told us that there was going to be live jazz in the lobby that night, so we got there early and listened to the band for a bit before finally turning in.

It had been a long day full of twists and turns, and ups and downs - all literally, not figuratively - and we needed a good rest. We'd been going non-stop since we arrived and were looking forward to a bit of down time. The guys would have to wait a little longer for that, though. They had a 9:30 a.m. tee-off at the Del Monte Golf Course, adjacent to the hotel.