Aside from family activities, the biggest highlight of my visit to the U.S. on this trip was the drive up and down through Big Sur in California. I’ve done the drive before, but not in about 16 years. I still remembered the lesson I learned from my previous drive: always fill up the tank before you start either end. You can always buy fuel along the way, but any time you pull into a service station with padlocks on the pumps and signs that say “No Self Service”, you know you’re in for sticker shock. I had the same nasty experience driving out to Uluru in Central Australia from the Stuart Highway. Those fuel prices were the highest I came across driving around Australia in 2004.
Anyway, January seemed like a nice time to enjoy the twists and turns and spectacular misty views of Big Sur without the usual horde of tourists. Among the more interesting discoveries was a huge California condor perched on a railing at a scenic turnout overlooking one of the peaks of the mountainous drive. In case you’re curious, they’re actually butt ugly. And I also stumbled across a huge colony of elephant seals and their newborns on a beach just north of San Simeon. They seemed quite ensconced there, with a newly built boardwalk overlooking them. Obviously I wasn’t the first to find them. It seemed designed to protect them from human spectators.
Well, it came time to temporarily tuck that wilderness stuff away and make the culturally obligatory visit up to Hearst Castle. I had never been there before (usually speeding past), but I found the place equally compelling and repulsive. I have to admit I felt a bit biased against Randolph Hearst after seeing Citizen Kane recently. On the one hand, it was interesting to see the place the movie was supposedly based on. And it was interesting to see some of the antiquities and artworks Hearst collected, along with the Art Deco styling of the era. On the other hand, the whole concept of frivolously blowing this kind of money on something for just himself and his friends, and then having it end up as a $20 amusement park for the general public was a bit nauseating.
Probably the most priceless aspect of the tour was just overhearing the lame banter among the other tourists. Comments like “How would you like to wake up and view that every day!” and “If you had all the money in the world…” were repeated. The staff weren’t any better. Most acted like it was a Disneyland tour (another culturally obligatory visit I’ve been putting off). They were trying to sell portraits of visitors at the entrance. “But what good’s a photo without Mickey?”, I should have asked. And a long line of tour guides all waved goodbye to us in unison at the top of the hill when our bus pulled out. Maybe they were mechanical, as I suspected.
The whole experience left me longing to visit the Getty Museum in Los Angeles when I got there. I figured it would be a bit of a contrast to see how two millionaires spent their wads. One for good (or at least it came good in the end for Getty, with free admission for the public to see their vast collection of artworks), and the other for evil, in the case of the purely capitalist Hearst Castle.
Other stops in California included:
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