Road trip: Up the California Coast

Yesterday was the last leg of our trip: LA to San Francisco. We drove about halfway, then took a detour to check out Hearst Castle. It was pretty nuts - here's one of the guest "cottages":

The estate is so huge you can really only see part of it in a day - we did a tour of the "grand rooms" of the main house, which is 68,500 square feet and has 115 rooms in all (we only saw the big entertaining rooms on the ground floor). I didn't realize that Hearst imported so much of the place from ancient European castles, monasteries, etc... For example, all the rooms we saw had ceilings that were taken from 15th-16th century European buildings, cleaned up by Hearst, and then installed in his home. Here are a few:

There was also a ton of ancient art, like the remains of this 2,000+ year old Greek statue:

The limbs and head may be gone, but the most important organ remains.

It was kind of funny though, because in the midst of all the antiquities would be some "contemporary" items that looked out of place, like these very 1950s chairs:

After the official tour you are free to wander the grounds, which are beautiful and overlook the ocean.

Usually the Neptune Pool is a main attraction, but due to the drought it was empty and looked considerably less cool. The indoor Roman pool was still filled though, and it was the most gorgeous part of the whole estate. It's covered entirely in blue glass and gold tiles - I've never seen anything like it before.

Gold tiles on the floor

Sooooooo prettyyyyyyyy

Gold tiles under the water

Also, I didn't realize that Hearst built the castle in the middle of what had been his family's ranch, so you go through all this ranch land to get there and pass an odd assortment of herds of cattle and random other animals descended from the occupants of the zoo Hearst used to keep there. Apparently there are several herds of zebra roaming around - we didn't see them, but we did see a lot of these guys:

After the castle, we drove the rest of the way up Route 1 instead of the main highway, since it takes you along the coastline and is beautiful. The whole drive is gorgeous - you have the ocean on one side and mountains on the other, and it seems like every time you round a corner you come across a sweeping vista more beautiful than the last. We stopped a few times to take photos, but if we had stopped as often as we thought about it, we probably would still be inching our way up the coast.

We finally made it to San Francisco last night, thus bringing a great road trip to an end. Ben actually left for a conference in Rome today, and he'll come back and start his new job next week. I'll spend the weekend getting settled in, and go back to work on Monday. All told we drove 3,700+ miles (not including driving within each city or our little 450 mile day trip to the Grand Canyon) in 18 days, ate an unknowable number of calories, carbs, and everything else  that's bad for you, and had a fantastic time.