Hearst Castle, San Simeon

This last weekend we went to Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA for Heather's birthday. We left Thursday after I got off work and got into San Simeon about 8:15PM. We went in our new hot Mazdaspeed 3 (pics soon) and the car made the drive almost effortless. The navigation took care of the directions and the turbo's torque tore through the hills.

Hearst Castle offers 5 tours. We went on Tour 1 on Friday and Tour 2 on Saturday. Our original plan was to take both tours on Friday, but, Katie was a bit fussy at the end of tour 1 and we had the tour time for tour 2 changed to Saturday. Tour 1 was okay, but you only see a few of the rooms in the main building (La Casa Grande) which kinda makes the place feel smaller than it really is. Tour 2 takes you through many more rooms on the second and third floor. We really almost felt lost going through so many corridors, stairways, and rooms. Everything had some kind of carving, relief, or sculpture to it. The walls, windows, doorways, ceilings, overhangs, everything was decorated. Unfortunately, there was not one theme for the estate. It was supposed to be a Mediterranean theme, but he had so many different schemes packed together. Hearst would take two of three pieces of history and glue them together to make a relic he could hang on the wall. Every room had a different ceiling type. Hearst even mixed religions. You could find Greek, Roman, and Christian mythology throughout the entire estate. All in all it was an interesting trip and we all enjoyed ourselves.