Day 23 - Monterey to San Francisco

A couple of really neat stops today, but we'll get to that in a minute. I got a bit of an earlier than planned start this morning, but I needed that extra half an hour in order to make a couple stops. I had to replenish the ice in my cooler and then my car desperately needed to be washed. So I made it up to the Winchester Mystery House pretty much right on schedule.

The Winchester Mystery House was something I had really been looking forward to. If you're not familiar with it's history, it's quite interesting. Sarah Winchester was married to the CEO of the Winchester company. Their daughter died at just 6 weeks old, and then Mr. Winchester died as well. Sarah attributed their deaths to the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles, and those spirits told her that she needed to expand the house and never stop construction on it, so that's exactly what she did for something like 38 years until the day she died. She was her own architect, but she had no training and was pretty eccentric, so there are all sorts of weird quirks in the house. There is a staircase that leads right into a ceiling, a second floor door that opens right to the outside with no landing, a bathroom with only a door from the outside, and a lot more like that. There is also no rhyme or reason to how the house is laid out - a distinct lack of hallways. In 1906, the great earthquake trapped Mrs Winchester in one of the front rooms and once she was rescued, she ordered all of the front rooms to be boarded up while construction continued on the back rooms.

At the house, I did both the Mansion and the Behind the Scenes tour. The Mansion tour was fine - it was pretty interesting walking through there, I just didn't like my tour guide. He used way too much inflection in his obviously memorized speech. His jokes weren't funny either. After that tour, I wasn't so excited about going on the Behind the Scenes tour, but I'm really glad I did. I really liked our tour guide for that second tour and she had a lot of great info for us. In general, I do wish that I had had a floor plan to follow as we walked through the house - that would have been fascinating to me.

After finishing up at the Winchester House, I traveled up to San Francisco. First stop was Filoli, another mansion. I didn't retain the exact history of this house, but it's a bit more modern (built after the 1906 earthquake), and obviously isn't crazy like the Winchester House. There were 2 owners of the house before it was turned over to the preservation society. The house is beautiful, but I wish I could have seen the bedrooms on the second floor. And the gardens were absolutely amazing.

I made it successfully to my friend's apartment in San Francisco. I'm staying here for a few nights and I'm absolutely exhausted again, so I'm calling it an early night.