San Francisco to Paso Robles & Hearst Castle (89 – 93)

Leaving on a quiet Sunday morning with good driving weather is a great way to tackle a major US city, or so we planned, and that turned out to be pretty much the case. Despite the early traffic being quite light, we didn’t want to drive through San Francisco’s CBD, and that’s highway 101 would have taken us. I didn’t fancy getting tangled up with the hills and cable cars at any time of the day!

Thus we had plotted two GPS navigation points that took us in a similar arc to the north and east of the city before heading south. We became a little lost on the way to San Francisco (missed one turn) and the route we had planned to head out today seemed a little easier.

Nevertheless, one of the disadvantages of using the Tom Tom for directions towing such a large rig caught us again. As we were heading SE in our large arc, we came across a bridge with a 4 ton limit and our total rig weight is closer to 8½ tons. Thankfully, we noticed the signs while we still had time to turn off that road and ended up completely lost in some dockyard/warehousing area. It certainly wasn’t a comforting place to see as most of the glass windows in almost all of the buildings had been smashed and there wasn’t another sign of life anywhere – really eerie!

As Homer had temporarily become a useless appendage, we drove back from whence we came and tried heading further north. We knew his bleats of “turn left”, “if possible, make a U turn” and “turn right” were only trying to take us back to the same bridge. Thus we needed to get much further away and become “lost” before he’d choose another route. Fortunately that turned out well and we didn’t strike any dead ends or excessively narrow roads.

We soon found ourselves heading south and passed the eastern side of bridge that he’s earlier wanted us to traverse. The traffic slowly became heavier as the morning wore on but still moved at a good speed. Eventually we were reunited with the 101 about 80 kms south of San Francisco and settled in to our 400 kilometre drive (total distance between the two points) to Paso Robles.

Our original plan was not to follow the 101 south, but to drive down highway 1. Highway 1 was right on the coast and provides spectacular views over the Pacific. However, we had been warned by a number of people not to use that route, particularly around a place called Big Sur. They had all told us tales of the very narrow road with “switch backs” (U turns) and the need to use both sides of the road with such a large rig. One person told me they attempted it and several sections of the road, without safety rails had broken away, such that the painted edge on the side of the road had disappeared down the cliff.

Hearst Castle is located near the township of San Simeon on highway 1 and our plan was to stay in a Paso Robles campground, leave the Sierra there and take the Chev to the castle. Thus, we woke on Monday morning to cloudy but blue skies and headed off on our 80 kilometre journey to see Hearst Castle.

The road between 101 and 1 traversed a 1600 feet high mountain range, not particularly high, but the road was quite steep in parts and made me quite happy that parted with the Sierra for the day. When we arrived at Hearst Castle’s car park, but couldn’t see anything that resembled a castle. There was a building we walked towards that had a sign “Hearst Castle, Visitor Center” but even after we entered that and walked past the gift shop, past the tour desk, past the coffee shop/restaurant and out the back, no sign of a castle anywhere!

We collected out tour tickets from their ticket booth and were told that our group would be paged when the tour was ready to commence. Soon enough, the public address system told us to gather at a certain point, our tickets were checked, we were paraded past a photographer that took our photo in front of a green screen and we were ushered outside to a waiting bus.

Casa Grande has 115 rooms on 4 floors
including 38 bedrooms, 42 baths, 14
sitting rooms, 2 libraries & a theatre

We discovered this bus was to take us up the hill to the Castle, a 5 miles long winding road through a tiny section of the grounds that, back in William Randolph Hearst’s days in the early 20th century, used to have all type of animals from different parts of the world (including kangaroos), roaming freely.

The Castle was built on Rancho Piedra Blanca that William Hearst's father, George Hearst originally purchased in 1865. The younger Hearst grew fond of this site over many childhood family camping trips, eventually naming it the “Enchanted Hill”.

Casa Grande's main
entrance doors

When he inherited the ranch from his mother Phoebe Hearst in 1919, it had grown to 250,000 acres (1,012 km2) and fourteen miles of coastline. Although the large ranch already had a Victorian mansion, the location selected for Hearst Castle was undeveloped, atop a steep hill (Enchanted Hill) whose ascent was a dirt path accessible only by foot or on horseback over five miles of cutbacks.

William Randolph Hearst, now a newspaper magnate chose Julia Morgan as his architect and by late summer 1919, Morgan had surveyed the site, analyzed its geology and drawn initial plans for the Main Building – construction began in 1919 and continued till 1947 when Hearst stopped living at the estate due to ill health.

Neptune Pool

During its construction, it was designed and continually re-designed as Hearst would see something he preferred rather than what had been built, and often had sections torn down or floors added to increase its magnificence – money was not an issue.

Indoor pool with 24c gold leaf
inlayed into the floor tiles

The estate comprises a romantic assembly of four major buildings, two swimming pools and acres of lush gardens that represented Hearst’s fantasy of a Mediterranean hill town. The list of high-profile invitees to visit and stay at the Castle is endless, from leaders of countries, actors, politicians, a veritable who’s who list of people from around the globe.

Within the main dining room is a very long, quite narrow table that seated about 24 people. Hearst sat in the centre of the table and newly invited guests were placed beside him. Each guest had their name on a place-card and when dinner was to be served, they would all enter the dining hall, find their position at the table and sit down. The following evening, they would discover their place-card had moved away from the centre of the table by one position, the following night the same.



A tiny section of the beautifully
manicured, lush gardens



Eventually, as they neared the end of the table, they realized their time at Hearst Castle was almost at an end and their last evening would be when they sat at the last position on the table. In that way, no-one was ever asked to leave, it simply became very obvious your “time was up” and you left.

William Hearst died in 1951 and in 1957 the Hearst Corporation donated the property to the state of California, and it’s now listed as a National Historic Landmark mansion. Since that time it has been maintained as a state historic park where the estate, and its considerable collection of art and antiques, attracts roughly one million visitors per year, despite its location far from any urban centre.

To save me endlessly waffling on, if you would like to read more about Hearst Castle or its history, click on this link: Hearst Castle

We left Hearst Castle around mid afternoon and had heard about an Elephant Seal colony, right on the 101 just north of San Simeon, thus we headed north to have a look. A well sign-posted spot with plenty of cars in a large car park alerted us to the place.

As we left the car and were walking towards the beach, a far-too-friendly squirrel kept running towards us and stopping right at our feet. With its sharp looking claws, I didn’t want it to shoot up my leg in search of “nuts”. So we all tried to steer well away, however, it kept chasing us for quite some distance which made the girls squeal and shriek. It eventually found another family and ran to them....yay!

Our timing to see these beautiful creatures was very good. We were a few weeks early to see the large males arriving and fights with other males for dominance, but were glad in a way we didn’t witness these bloody battles. A lovely elderly volunteer was there to chat to people about what we were seeing and re-tell some of her stories that she’d seen over the past 16 years of observation at this same location. She kept us fascinated for 15 minutes or so.

There was little movement on the beach and for the most part, the seals could have been dead tree trunks lying there. The young pups, however, provided the best laughter and viewing as they were also closest to us. The beach was fenced off, but the viewing platforms allowed us to get with about 3 metres of the closest seals.

After about 30 minutes we wandered back to the car looking for our little squirrel and found it being hand fed by some people. So much for us big scaredy cats!! Still, those claws and teeth did look sharp!

Sharing a joke

Our drive back to the campground took us past many wineries, so we felt obliged to have a look at one to sample their product, after all, they’d gone to a lot of bother to make the stuff. Grace captured a photo of me swirling the red wine in a glass and sniffing it – frankly, I’ve no idea what I was doing but I’ve seen other people do it and it seems to impress the folk behind the counter!! We exchanged money for some of their goods and headed back home, having had a very pleasant day.

Tomorrow, our journey is to Solvang, a mere 150 kms further south.