Morro Bay and Hearst Castle

  Morro Bay, California, United States
Sunday, November 9, 2008

When we drew back the curtains this morning, sun streamed into our room in the Salinas motel. But it wouldn't last. As we drove back to the coast, we drove into cloud and the rain started to pour down again. It looked as if Monterey had suffered this weather all night and there was no way of knowing from there that just inland the skies were clear and blue.

A gloomy coastline

The sun is fighting through

Lunchtime view

Sunshine at last

But we stuck to the coastline anyway and were eventually rewarded for our perseverence. After driving through rain for a couple of hours along a winding road that clung tightly to the rugged coastal cliffs, we came to a tiny town called Lucia where we stopped for brunch. When I say tiny, I mean tiny. It looked as if the town was composed of just the restaurant where we stopped, with its adjoined little shop and holiday cabins in the garden and two houses that we spotted up the road. But it suited us just fine and we ate a tasty meal high up above the sea as the skies turned from grey to blue and the ocean began to glisten in the sun. The last stretch of the scenic coastal drive lived up to its name much better, thanks to the change in light and weather. An hour later, we had wound our way past the last of the true towering headlands and came upon a flatter stretch of road. The hills still climbed away to our left, but we were much closer to sea level and there were now broad sandy beaches and rocky outcrops against which the pristine blue sea swirled and crashed in bright white rollers to our right. One of these beaches was strewn with what appeared to be large, elongated, dull-coloured boulders warn smooth from the waves. A second glance changed this impression and they seemed instead to be pieces of driftwood. But neither of these interpretations were correct, they were elephant seals - enormous, light-brown, sea-mammals lazing around in the sun.


The we spied today's tourist destination of choice, high on one of the green, grassy hills on our left: Hearst Castle. Built by William Randalph Hearst in the 1920s as one of many ridiculously luxurious retreats, Hearst Castle boasts 144 rooms, including a stupid number of bedrooms and a living room that could house a basketball court. His inspiration for this castle came from his travels in Europe when he was just a small child and the main house was modelled loosely on a building in Ronda, Spain.

Hearst Castle

Mr Hearst's sea view

Heir to a massive fortune that his father accumulated through his silver mining business, William Randalph Hearst made his own mammoth fortune in the media business. At its height, he owned 25% of the nation's newspapers as well as many magazines, radio stations and a film studio. Apparently the film "Citizen Cane" is meant to be about Mr Hearst.


He was a lover of art and collected incredible numbers of paintings, sculptures, tapestries and bits of old buildings (like ornamental wooden ceilings and pieces of an ancient roman temple). So, his claim was that he needed somewhere to house this collection and therefore built this enormous home (with several guesthouses) and filled each of the rooms with exquisite and priceless artifacts.

One of the guesthouses at Hearst Castle

The Neptune Pool

The broken pieces of the roman temple, for instance, were cemented together with care and formed the backdrop to his vast outdoor "Neptune Swimming Pool". As visitors, we were treated first to a film on how and why he built this castle high in the hills overlooking the sea and on the many celebrities that he received here, including Winston Churchill, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin and every glamorous Hollywood actress from the era. Then we were shepherded onto a bus to be driven up the hill to the house and led around by a very jovial tour guide. Although we were slightly put off by the exaggerated number of "wow!"s expressed by many of the other audience members (really, every detail deserves a wow? can't we just save that reaction for the most impressive bits?), touring part of the property was pretty special. It was remarkably tasteful and homely for such a mansion of a home - not overly glitzy and certainly crafted with a clear passion for all of the amazing artifacts. It was late afternoon by the time we had completed our tour of the castle and time to find somewhere to stay.

Sunset on over the Pacific

We drove a little further south, now with the setting sun lighting the sky over the sea in vivid shades of red and purple, to find a comfy (Indian-run, what are the chances?) motel in Morro Bay.