Woke up in San Simeon, absolutely beautiful day, not like the day before. Had breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, same place we had dinner.

Packed up and off to Hearst Castle. They offered several tours, but made it clear that the basic tour (the “grand rooms”) was the easiest in terms of stairs – but yet was tough enough they also offered a more easily navigatable version of the same tour for those who with mobility issues. Dad had said he thought he’d be fine with the basic tour, so that’s what we’d signed up for.

You park by a visitor’s center which is at the bottom of the big hill where the mansion is, and they bus you up to the mansion. (I guess if you sign up for multiple tours, you’d have to keep going back down and then back up.) The countryside is great, fun views of the ocean, and there are goats and other animals. Hearst had his own private zoo and apparently, because of that, there’s actually a herd of wild zebras that still hangs around the area, although we didn’t get to see them.

The tour, which was led by a guide, included the outsides of the guest houses, the Neptune pool, the ‘grand rooms’ in the mansion and some other things. I was very impressed by the Neptune pool, which had to be rebuilt several times because, apparently, Hearst loved to change his mind, which must have driven his architect batty. (She was a lady, BTW.)

Unfortunately, Dad did have a bit of trouble with all the stairs, and when we were touring the inside, there was often a race between him and another elderly gentleman to get to the few chairs available. But basically, it was fine. The tour was really interesting – I’d love to go back and do the upper rooms and the guest houses. But of course, it was all modeled on grand homes in Europe, and if you’ve actually seen the originals, it feels a bit fake.

Afterward, they bussed us back down the mountain to the visitor’s center and there was a really great 40-minute movie about Hearst and the castle (skipping the bits about his fascism and such). Not only was it really interesting, it was quite beautiful as far as cinematography, and was narrated by Jeff Bridges, I think.

Meanwhile, every time I checked social media, my friends were pushing us to go see the elephant seals, which were basically right there, so we did. We saw maybe forty, but the seas were really rough, so it felt like there were maybe usually more?

On the way out of town, we stopped at the Main Street Grill, which was a giant order-at-the-counter place – quite good, actually. I had a chicken sandwich, Dad had a salad.

Our route up to Monterey started with us backtracking back to where we’d gone to Kohl’s the day before.

As you can see, because of rockslides a couple of years ago, we actually couldn’t do the really cool part of Route 1 along the coast, which was kind of why we wanted to do this trip. Argh. So this drive wasn’t particularly interesting.

In Monterey, we stayed at the Colton Inn, which was quite odd, but friendly and not bad. (the breakfast was included, which we hadn’t been running into much). The lady behind the desk suggested we could easily walk to restaurants for dinner, but what she’d said didn’t make sense to me when I looked at a map. Once we were ready for drinks and dinner, we drove down to the wharf (there are two, actually), but Dad didn’t really want to walk the wharf and it was foggy and we got kind of lost and turned around and we ended up going back to the inn and walking to a restaurant anyway. Which turned out to be unusually fancy and interesting.

It was called Stokes Adobe and the reason I’d been puzzled is that the street pattern around it didn’t make a lot of sense, but it was actually really close to us. I’d also probably tried to get a table online and it looked like they had none, but it was one of those deals where if you were willing to sit at one of the bar tables, you were fine. What was kind of funny was this was very much a fancy adult restaurant and not long after we got seated, an Asian family with a lot of little kids came in and got seated at the next table. “ugh, children” I sighed. Why are you bringing kids into this kind of place? But these kids were astonishingly well-behaved and either they had kid-friendly food or they brought their own and were no problem at all.

We had cocktails and wine, and he had scallops and I had cavatelli.  For dessert – he had cinnamon beignets and I had eggnog, nice to at least get a bit of Christmas.  That was a really nice meal!

And off to bed.