The previous installments are:
The Early Years
Room Addition
Repaint then Road Trip
The Great Highway 1 Housetruck Race
Extreme Makeover
Guest House
Rural Retreat
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My next trip to visit Prakash was not planned. My mother died unexpectedly on New Year's Day 1996, and I hastily packed my pickup truck and assembled my work and home situations so that I could make an emergency trip to Las Vegas to take care of her remains and put her possessions and affairs in order. The trip to LV was rushed, two days of more-or-less continuous driving, with an overnight at my half-sister's home near Yosemite.
I'll spare everyone the sordid details of my five days and nights in the Capital of Sin, but suffice it to say, I was not there for fun and gambling. I had never liked Las Vegas in all the 25 year Mom had lived there, and my purpose for being there this time brought me no joy. The air was a thick brown haze, the apartment she lived in messy, disorganized and strewn with cigarette ashes and butts. McCarren International Airport was about four blocks away, so I listened to jets taking off all day and all night.
The day that I completed my task, I escaped Las Vegas, hopefully for the last time ever, and then spent an incredible night camping in the remote desert near Lucerne, California. I set up in a secluded valley, far from the road where the stars were brilliant and I heard no sounds except for those I made myself.
In the morning, I visited some property I own near Apple Valley, California, and toured a neighborhood of rural properties where I spent nearly every weekend of my adolescence. After that, it was over to San Diego, CA to visit my grandfather, who lived in a mobile home park.
The visit was pleasant enough, and Granddad and I, along with my step mother visited my father's grave and then had lunch together. The weather was superb, 89 degrees in January! I spent about an hour in the mobile home park's swimming pool, something you can't really do in Oregon in the winter.
After leaving San Diego, I spent two hours driving through my old hometown, Los Angeles, stuck in stop-and-go freeway traffic, attempting to get to the north end of the city so I could continue my journey home.
An overnight at a state park north of Santa Barbara, then we can get busy with some stuff you might actually find interesting.
Now that I had cellular telephone service again, I called Prakash and let him know that I was headed north, and asked if I could stop by an visit. Of course, I was granted an unlimited stay, but on that particular day, he was headed up to "The City" (San Francisco) to pick up some candles he had made and consigned to a craft shop that was closing. He suggested that I find a way to kill some time, perhaps a visit to Hearst Castle. This was actually something I had been considering, and now with some spare time to consume during the trip while Prakash made his errand for the day, I decided to take one of the tours.
Hearst Castle is a huge residence and guest buildings built on a large estate near San Simeon, CA in the early decades of the 1900's by William Randolph Hearst, the famous newspaper mogul. Rather than try and do my own review, I'll refer you to the Hearst Castle web site. The entire estate is now a California State Park, and there are multiple tours available that show off the buildings and grounds.
I went on "Tour #1", the general tour that shows the interior of one of the guest houses, two of the swimming pools (indoor and outdoor), the dining hall and more. I was interested in looking at the architecture and interior design partly to gather ideas for building the Crown.
Here's an image of the outdoor pool, grabbed from a Google search of the 'net:
It was another warm and sunny day, and being surrounded by clean air and beautiful buildings and landscaping eased my heavy heart just a bit. I once again felt a bit of enjoyment creep back into my life. The docents at the Castle were friendly, and one, noticing the logo on my radio station tee shirt struck up a conversation about Oregon. I began a slow recovery to normalcy that took more than a year to complete.
Hearst Castle is a place that I had visited a couple of times during my childhood. My father was an avid hobbyist photographer, and the family had taken a few trips up the coast to tour the Castle. In the personal effects of my deceased mother were dozens of boxes of 35mm slides, some of which had images of our trips to Hearst Castle. One day, I may get around to digitizing some of those for my own enjoyment.
In the meantime, here's another Google-searched image from the internet, I have invested quite a lot of time touching up this particular photo in Photoshop. The full-sized image is one of my favorite desktop wallpaper images:
I wonder how much trouble you'd get into if you simply dived in for a swim in the middle of the tour? For that matter, I wonder if the water is heated? Brrr...
