As I've gotten older, I've learned that there are more sublime pleasures than the city has to offer, and no matter how exciting or hip an urban center is, its ability to entertain relies more upon its capacity for distraction than awe. With this in mind, we headed on down the coast to Big Sur, stopping along the way to pick some strawberries on Highway 1:
This was easily the most radical roadside fruit stand I have ever seen, and inside there were posters of Caesar Chavez and signs stating that all of the workers who picked berries there were union members. Best of all, the whole thing was done on the honor system. Rather than a clerk, each customer made his or own change from a tray of cash at the counter:
Since we had changed our plans, we didn't have a place to stay that night and rolled into a campsite off the beaten path just as darkness descended. This was our first night of camping, and it was more challenging than I had anticipated to set up our tent in the dark. In spite of this, we managed and woke the next morning to see the fog filling up the valley below us:
After breaking camp we continued onward, but unfortunately the Henry Miller Library was closed for a private event. Undeterred, we drove on.
(it was a Camper Van Beethoven concert of all things)
Everything was enshrouded by a dense fog at this point, and although it made the ocean invisible at times, it also gave everything a palpable sense of mystery:
By the time we reached the home of the elephant seals north of San Luis Obispo, things had cleared almost completely. We stopped to watch the seals, which seem to spend most of their time either fighting one another:
Or snuggling:
much like humans, no?
We reached Hearst Castle at noon, which I had insisted we visit even from the early stages of our planning. My interest in William Randolph Hearst comes from two things: 1) he was allegedly the inspiration for Citizen Kane; and 2) his granddaughter is one of my all-time favorite kidnap-victim-turned-bank-robbing-terrorists.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that Hearst Castle is beyond compare, making even the Vanderbilts' Biltmore Estate seem insufficient in comparison.
my yin at the entrance to one of the guest houses
Hearst started building his palace on his family's land as soon as his parents died, and he didn't stop construction on it until his own death nearly thirty years later. It is simultaneously grand and gaudy, including everything from a tennis court:
To a movie theater:
He had an outdoor pool adorned with Corinthian columns:
(and by "Corinthian", I mean they were actually from Corinth)
And an indoor pool with real Roman ruins:
In his dining room he had freaky, chimerical statues from medieval Europe:
And used confession chairs as wallpaper:
He even had a special cage built for his polar bear:
yes, polar bear
Overwhelmed by these exorbitant displays of wealth, my yin and I found ourselves looking much like the statues surrounding us:
my modest yin
discus anyone?
don't pull your hair out!
By the end of the tour, the fog was only a memory and our drive back north allowed us countless views of the stunningly blue Big Sur coastline:
Along the way we took a short hike to a waterfall:
Before finally setting up camp once more at Limekiln State Park, which gets its name from the wood-fired kilns that once turned redwoods into lime:
you see what they did there?
Exhausted by the tour and lulled by the sound of waves crashing on the cliffs below our campsite, my yin decided to take a nap:
I soon joined her.
We took another short hike after our nap and returned to camp just in time for sunset. To get a better view, I scurried across the slippy rocks where the stream flows into the ocean, carrying our brand new fancy camera. My yin did not approve:
Thankfully there were no missteps, and the images speak for themselves:
sunset at Limekiln
a solitary bird
a colony of purple flowers
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