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.

Road Trip: Jackson

The first thing we did in Jackson was meet the new baby of the friends we were staying with:

Baby!

He's only three weeks old - you might think that most sane people wouldn't have house guests three weeks after having a baby, but these friends are serious about their Southern hospitality. For example, here's the cabinet in the guest bathroom:

There is at least three of each travel size item.

The next day we visited some of the historic sites around town, starting with the bus station where the Freedom Riders were arrested:

Medgar Evers' statue, which is next to a library and park named after him:

We also visited Medgar Evers' home, but didn't think it was appropriate to take photos with a murder scene.

It was unsettling to stand right in the driveway where he was assassinated in front of his family, especially given recent acts of white supremacist terrorism. There's not much there to commemorate it other than a plaque:

And speaking of white supremacy, this is what the Mississippi supreme court looks like:

I know it's the state flag of Mississippi, but it's still appalling.

In the afternoon, we went to the Mississippi Museum of Art, which was beautiful:

The art inside was all by Mississippians, and was incredibly diverse. There was everything from mechanized models of the constellations:

To gorgeous handmade quilts:

I also got a reassuring message in the gift shop:

We spent the rest of the day at home with our friends, playing board games and ogling the baby. It was a great third stop!

Art art art

There was a big interactive art festival near us this week! Saint Gobain, which is a giant international company I've never heard of before, was apparently celebrating their 350th anniversary - they created four interactive art "pavilions" and took them on a world tour. Their North American stop was Philadelphia, since apparently it's where their headquarters on the continent are. It was pretty groovy looking:

The pavilions!

Lit up after the sun went down!

The lines were pretty long, so we only had time to go into two of the four pavilions - one had a groovy fog and laser show inside, and the other was a bunch of spinning platforms with big colorful walls:

Selfie on the spinning color thing!

Yay, art!

Unexpected party

Since we live downtown, and specifically in the Gayborhood, we often leave our apartment to discover unexpected parties - an arts festival or gay pride parade or something else fun happening on our street. Today, though, we went outside after dinner to go to the convenience store, and encountered this:

That's several hundred people, all dressed in white, having a formal dinner along the entire street from here to City Hall. There was also live music and mummers dressed in white (although we didn't get a good picture of them).

We googled it when we got home, apparently it's called Diner en Blanc and is sort of a flashmob/public art thing. It's pretty cool looking, but - as our friend who was there too said - it also kind of looks like "a summer formal for the klan."

Morning art walk

Walking past the Kimmel Center this morning I saw there was some sort of hubbub inside, so I went in to check it out. Turns out they were having a small art exhibit in the lobby, featuring busts of famous composers that played recordings of their work when you pushed a button.

The cool part was that the busts were sculpted out of old books:

Not knowing much about classical music, I spent more time checking out the book spines than the faces and recordings. So far as I could tell, they didn't have any relation to the composer they (ahem) composed, but seemed to be chosen based on size and color.

What a nice way to start the day - surprise art!

Small rebellion

This appeared at the park near our house over the weekend:

Take that, The Man.

Barnes

Ben and I decided to get some Culture-with-a-capital-C today and visit the Barnes Foundation. If you haven't heard of it, Barnes was a self-made gajillionaire who invented an anti-gonorrhea drug, and spent his money on buying lots of Art, which he filled his house up with. When he died he wanted his collection to be available to the public, but on the condition that it remained exactly in place, in his house out in the suburbs. In the early 2000s the foundation successfully petitioned to move the collection to downtown Philadelphia so more people could access it (and they could bring in more money), and it was a whole big controversy that all the Art people were very upset about. They even made a movie about it. Anyway, the shiny new Barnes building opened up shortly after Ben and I moved to Philly, and today we finally got around to going.

I can't say that I really got or was excited about any of the art, since it all looks the same to my unsophisticated eye (although some of the antique locksmith materials were cool). But the building itself was really fun to be in - all high ceilings and unusually-shaped rooms; there's a multi-story indoor garden, and even the bathrooms were architecturally interesting. You couldn't take pictures inside, but here's a picture of the exterior (including the moat that surrounds it), which gives an idea of the type of place it is:

I wouldn't pay money to go back, but I think we will add it to the list of interesting places we take walks to. You know, so we can class ourselves up a bit.

PIFA returns!

That's right, it's once again time for the biennial Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts! Last time the theme was France (or maybe Paris?), this year it is time travel. So not only is our backyard trapeze back (yay!), but there is also a dinosaur in front of our building.

His arms and head move, and they even trucked in sand and little palm trees for his environment. In other parts of the street, they brought in lots of sod and flowers to create pop-up parks.

This usually looks like this.

You can also see some of the street performers in that picture, those ones were dressed like giant sparkly insects. There were also some on stilts "riding" metal bird-horse creatures:

They could even make the creatures' mouths open and close

The coolest street performer was one of those living statue people, who danced to operatic music. She was the only living statue I've seen with a water feature.

Water streamed out of her fingertips, and even out the top of her head!

In addition to the street performers, there seemed to be a decent number of Renaissance Faire people, I think as part of the "time travel" theme.

A knight

A guy with a portable bellows-driven bubble machine

Lest we forget that time travel can take us to the future as well as the past, there was a robot that drove around talking to people.

Other things in the street that aren't usually there included a Ferris wheel:

And a bunch of guys welding something unidentifiable:

The centerpiece of everything was an elaborate "time machine" inside the Kimmel center, but it was probably the least interesting part of the festival, given that it was basically just a  walk-through tube that lit up and played odd noises.

Ben about to enter the "time machine." Time did pass inside it, but only at the usual rate.

Happily, there was another time machine that was much cooler:

Complete with flux capacitor!

Springtime in Philly

We live near an art school, and one of the signs that the weather is getting nicer is that the students start yarn bombing things. We just noticed a particularly tall one this weekend:

Technically, I think this one is actually some sort of ribbon bombing:

This also appeared, lest we forget that even in the spring, Philly is still Philly:

Seen around Philly

BIG BELLY IS WATCHING YOU.

Hudson River Valley

We spent the last two days of our vacation in the Hudson River Valley, for the extremely significant reason that it is halfway between Burlington, VT (home of the farthest-away friends we visited) and Philadelphia, and I wanted a break from driving. Despite the dire weather forecast, it only rained for about half of our stay, and for the other half it was quite nice.

This was the view outside our window (when it stopped raining).

We stayed in a bed and breakfast, which was great with the possible exception of its super-bizarre hallway Art: Ziploc bags filled with paint and nailed to boards in semi-patriotic arrangements.

See, it looks patriotic! Also, slightly like blood.

It is definitely made of Ziploc bags, paint, and nails.

Some of the Ziploc Art also had plastic condiment cup lids in it, I'm assuming for extra Art:

History!

Disposable plastic lids!

Other Art had little explanatory tags attached to it:

Hmm, I don't recognize this flag...

... now I learned something!

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any tag that explained why someone decided to fill Ziploc bags with paint and tiny plastic lids, then nail them to boards in various interpretations of the American flag.

Art!

My other favorite part of where we stayed was that they had electric candles in the bathroom, which were obviously electric because:

1. They were made of plastic, and not wax.
2. They had a switch on the bottom, as well as a clearly visible battery compartment.

3. There was a sign in the bathroom telling you they are electric.

My favorite part is not that the candles were electric, but that despite the numerous indicators that they aren't real, they were all covered in scorch marks from people trying to light them with matches:

Gotta love people's determination to set things on fire! If only someone would carry that idea over to the hallway Art...