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Published: September 16th 2014
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Solvang
Today the people of Solvang want to keep this Danish style and run several Danish cafés, the restaurants serve typical Danish food and there are Danish flags on the flag poles California - bits and pieces from here and there
When we started to write the blog entries on the California part of this vacation we didn't know where to start. We visited so many interesting places we wanted to write about and we want to highlight them all in the blog. After some thinking and rethinking and sorting photos and resorting photos we hope we have come up with a set of blog entries that we can present without being ashamed.
Here in the first blog entry from California we will present a lot of different stuff from various parts of the Golden State. You'll find the majestic Hearst Castle, grand vistas of Big Sur, ugly-cute elephant seals, the quirky and fascinating Winchester Mystery House, a piece of Denmark very far away from Scandinavia and an opera house in the middle of the desert.
In Santa Barbara County in western California there is a small town called
Solvang. The town was established by Danish immigrants and they brought with them various Danish traditions. For instance they built their houses to look like Danish houses. Today the people of the town want to
Solvang
Solvang was established by Danish immigrants and they brought with them various Danish traditions. For instance they built their houses to look like Danish houses keep this Danish style and run several Danish cafés in town, the restaurants serve typical Danish food, there are Danish flags on the flag poles in town and the streets are named after Danish kings or authors or other famous Danes. In a way Solvang was bit silly but it was fun to visit and the town was a bit cute.
Further up along the coast we visited the
Hearst Castle. Hearst Castle was built by the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. We don’t want to call it his home because we believe that to him it wasn’t as much a home as it was a project where he made a childhood dream come alive.
The construction of the castle began in 1919 and went on for almost 30 years. Even though the castle is the size of a royal palace it is smaller that William Randolph Hearst wanted it to be. The castle was never finished. The entire back of the castle is bare and it is obvious that they intended to extend the building further in that direction.
The castle is built in a style borrowed from churches, castles and
Hearst Castle
Hearst Castle was built by the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. monasteries in southern Europe. Inside the castle much of the furniture, paintings and even entire ceilings and fireplaces were bought in Europe and brought to California on ships and placed in the castle. How they managed to purchase medieval ceilings and 500 year old hand carved choir stalls we can’t understand but somehow they did.
William Randolph Hearst often invited celebrities to his home. Among the guests who visited Hearst Castle were Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Greta Garbo and Winston Churchill. It was considered a great honour to be invited to Hearst Castle and the parties he held were legendary. William Randolph Hearst treated all his guests a bit like they were his own puppets on a string. When he told Greta Garbo that he wanted to go horse riding with her she went horse riding with him, when he told Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney to act in the balcony scene from Hamlet in the theatre in the mansion they played Hamlet and so on. Many of the celebrities didn't seem to mind that the host treated them like they were real life tamagotchis because most of them came back to the palace when they were
Hearst Castle
The construction of the castle began in 1919 and went on for almost 30 years. The castle was never finished. reinvited a few months or a year later.
Down by the ocean not far from Hearst Castle there is stretch of the beach where a large number of elephant seals live. We can’t really decide if elephant seals are cute or ugly. Take a look at the photos and decide for yourself.
When we drove from Los Angeles to San Fransisco much of the way we followed Highway 1 along the coast. A section of that coast is known as
Big Sur. The coastline there is more dramatic with higher and steeper cliffs and as a consequence the road has more bends and steeper hills than further south and further north.
North of Big Sur is the city San Jose. There we visited the former home of Sarah Winchester, a mansion that today goes under the name
Winchester Mystery House.
Sarah Winchester inherited both a large fortune and the Winchester Repeating Arms Company when her husband William Wirt Winchester passed away. WRAC is best known for manufacturing the Winchester Rifles, the firearms that helped conquering the wild west.
Soon after Sarah Winchester became a widow she purchased a
Hearst Castle
The castle is built in a style borrowed from churches, castles and monasteries in southern Europe farmhouse which she started to remodel, rebuild and expand. The building project started in 1884 and went on for almost 40 years until Sarah Winchester died in 1922.
The mansion is called Winchester Mystery House because the construction works were made without a master plan. One day Sarah Winchester wanted a room to be added to south, and the next day she could order a balcony on the third floor on the west side to be replaced with a room. Walls that used to be outer walls became inner walls when more rooms were added to the house making walls look strange in the house. Doors were installed according to a plan that included two rooms being connected to each other. But then the door became obsolete when Sarah Winchester changed her mind and scrapped the initial plans, the one with two rooms with a door in between, and had a staircase installed instead. So the door opens up into nothing. In the Winchester Mystery House there are more than a hundred odd construction details such as doors that open onto a wall, staircases that go nowhere, window placed in a floor, doors that leads into vertical
Hearst Castle
The first pool at this place was by any standards large and majestic. It was however replaced by an even bigger pool. Not even that pool was large enough to satisfy mr Hearst so that one was also replaced. The pool you see is the third incarnation of this pool. shafts and so on.
Amargosa is a place just outside Death Valley. It is not more than a few houses but, increadibly as it may sound, one of the houses is an opera house.
Amargosa Opera House must be one of the strangest places in the world for an opera house. In the desert a hundred miles from anything that even resembles civilisation.
In the end of the blog we added a photo of a solar power plant. It is not a good photo but we want to keep it on the blog anyway. The reason is that they use an interesting technique when they harvest the solar energy. They use a large number of mirrors that reflect and focus the sun's rays to a small area. The focal point becomes very hot and the heat is used to create steam that drives a turbine which generates electric power.
This blog entry contained all the photos that we wanted to include in the blog but couldn't fit in elsewhere. Hope you liked it even if it was a little bit of this and a little bit of that thrown together.
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Tara Cloud
Fabulous California!
Since I'm from Santa Barbara, I was thrilled to see you visiting all these places in my "backyard." Hearst got all his authentic furnishings from dealers he had roaming Europe, looking for monasteries and castles that were being torn down because the owners couldn't afford the upkeep. Thus, he saved a lot of art from destruction. I loved going up to Solvang for Danish pastries and then up to watch the (I think) cute elephant seals. What a great adventure you're having!