Highway 1 revisited again

For day 3 of our short break, we made a long trip down Highway 1 to Hearst Castle, the plaything of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, satirised as Xanadu in Citizen Kane. It's a beautiful hilltop villa with a view out to the nearby coast at San Simeon, built in the style of a Spanish renaissance church, and home to Hearst's huge collection of artwork and furniture. It was built over a relatively short period, from the 1920s to the 1940s, and was given to the state of California after Hearst's death.

And it is incredibly beautiful. There's a real roaring twenties atmosphere to the place - you can imagine young starlets doing lengths in the pool, as Hearst played host to many of the famous names of the day up there (Charlie Chaplin, Churchill [who apparently was Prime Minister of England if the guided tour is to be believed - ugh!], Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, etc etc).

Not bad, is it?

Because it's genuinely at the top of a hill, you spend 15 minutes on a bus to get there from the visitor centre. Imagine the last 5 minutes of the Italian Job, but without the gold. And with a commentary. And slightly more carefully driven. OK, the only thing it has in common is a lot of switchbacks on the road up a hill. You know what I meant.

It's not a bad view when you get there

The big house itself is where Hearst did most of the entertaining, including a large dining room, a beautiful lounge hung with huge Flemish tapestries, a private cinema that seated 50, two tennis courts, and an indoor pool underneath those, I guess in case the outdoor one got a bit too nippy in the winter.

I thought it was a bit like a slightly saner version of Portmeirion; unlike Portmeirion, the buildings were designed and built here and are essentially just very good fakes, but that means there's a singular architectural concept throughout and everything fits together well. Also, no large white globes coming to abduct you, so it's got that going for it.

For me, the real star of the day was Highway 1. As I've mentioned before, this is the coastal route that runs up and down most of the California coast, but the section we did here (from Big Sur down to San Simeon, about 90 miles South of Carmel) was breathtaking. I'd like to say we both enjoyed it, but I think Helen spent most of the drive peering through her fingers. The road is part open coastal cruise, and part Welsh mountain pass; here the mountains brush the coastline and dive down into the ocean, so the road clings to the land and jumps over creeks and small canyons on a series of elegant 1930s bridges. Great fun to drive in a small white Japanese sports car, maybe not so much fun being a passenger, particularly when avoiding the small rock slides.

Just as a taster: Highway 1 keeps serving up views like this:

You can see where the road passes down the hillside here, and over those twin bridges in the middle. This is all pretty de rigeur for these 90 miles.

The road is so popular that you often get stuck behind an RV (American for a mobile home or camper van), which are available for rent for those that want to drive the route. It's also near enough the edge that there are frequent roadworks to repair the odd landslip. Whilst waiting to pass those roadworks, who should we find ourselves behind, but Scooby Doo, Velma and the gang in the Mystery Machine?

And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for these pesky roadworks

If you've no idea what I'm on about at this point, see this.

Day 4 of our short break involved coming home to Palo Alto, but we still saw a few things on the way: firstly, we went for an extended walk around Carmel, finding the Mission that the Spanish instituted when they first came here in the late 1700s, and spending a bit more time getting excited about the sea at Carmel River Beach:

Then we headed off to Monterey, finishing on a full circle as we visited Cannery Row, as immortalised by Steinbeck. Well, to be honest, it's definitely not as immortalised by Steinbeck; the last of the canneries closed in the early 1970s, and the area has been regenerated as a series of tourist traps selling seaside tat. The one neat thing we found was a statue of Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck's friend and local resident, and the basis of a number of characters in his books.

And with that, it was back to the Bay Area.