Moonstone Beach, Cambria & Hearst Castle

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Sunday, December 8, 2013

We slept in again till after 7am. I forced myself out of bed and into the shower around 7:30am. We got up to the Moonstone Landing's registration room’s complimentary continental breakfast about 8:20am. It was good. Bagels and English muffins, raisin bread, plain bread, lots of different Danishes and muffins some with Olallieberries, yogurt, granola, hot cereal mixes, bananas, apples and oranges, coffee, tea and hot cocoa mix, water and orange juice and milk. We got filled up.

It was cold this morning after our toasty night by the fire. Sleeping by fire light was a little weird for me. I still remember  the Mirapex and the flickering flame-light hallucinations that kept me up at night as a side effect. Well, every time the heat would come on and the gas logs would light I would wake up and think Fire! Uh yeah. It’s a fireplace! It was actually pretty cozy. The bathroom though is heated with a heat lamp on a timer and the bathroom is by the entry door and it is cold and drafty over there. Also, the bathroom has a pocket door and neither of us seem inclined to use it. So, the bathroom is not so warm and toasty. Anyway, we have spectacular views in the early morning light. We are on a large kind of cove or bay I guess that extends to Piedras Blancas lighthouse. The sun rises on our left and sets on our right, so I guess that means the entire cove is south facing.

It was very cold overnight. I think it was below freezing. It was 30 and wind-chill of 24 degrees F when we got up and it was only about 40 something after 9am when we were ready to go out and walk the boardwalk here at Moonstone Beach. The day’s predicted high was 50 F. It was overcast and windy all day, so it felt colder. We also wanted to walk on the beach to look for California jade and “moonstones”. We planned to walk all the way to Leffingwell Landing to look for otters. We are pretty sure we saw otters off the rocks in the ocean in front of our Moonstone Landing hotel. We saw surfers, which was crazy! They had full body suits on but still their hands and feet were out in the cold. The weather report said the wind chill here this morning felt like 26 F. We layered up before setting out. I brought a full set of long underwear as well as a pair of  waterproof pants and I put all of it on with my regular sweater and jeans. I was comfortable enough.

There were some little birds flitting in and out of the bushes (creeping rosemary, I think) in front of our room and balcony since we arrived. This morning I stopped and watched them. They were hummingbirds!

So it took us about 2 hours to walk to Leffingwell Landing. Of course, we strolled and stopped and explored and climbed on rocks and watched birds and seals and otters. It was pretty amazing. There were spotted ground squirrels living under the boardwalk and they would dash out when you arrived and beg. It was a little scary. Clay wanted to sit on a bench and one ran out, so I jumped up and left. The squirrel jumped up on the bench and dashed almost inside Clay’s jacket. We left pretty quickly.

We walked back  on the boardwalk to Moonstone Landing much more quickly. But, I did stop to talk to a kayaker we saw come in at the landing. He had 2 fish. One was a big weird looking one that he said was the prized Lingcod. He said it was only midsized and that the week before he had caught one as long as his leg.  This is when we also saw sea otters close up by the rocks where the seals were still sunning themselves. The description we read of Leffingwell Landing was that it was a good place to watch sea otters cavorting, so we walked down there to find none. But, it did mean we came back to this spot and actually found a pair cavorting. We also saw a dead seal near where we had left the beach for the boardwalk on the way out. We don’t think it was there when we came by the first time. We didn’t go down to see if we could tell how it died. It still had a face and looked intact but kind of flat in the middle. It was sad.

We walked past the place we planned to have brunch at about noon and it looked really busy but since we probably won’t have dinner tonight, we didn’t want to eat yet. We have tickets for the 5:50pm evening tour at Hearst Castle tonight. That is why we aren’t planning to eat dinner tonight.

 We came back to the hotel and I asked at the desk about moonstones since we didn’t think we had found any, though we found tons of jade. So, points off to Moonstone Landing for no loaner binoculars for the otters and birds and for not having a sample of the beach’s moonstones. She did tell me where to go on Burton Street to ask and look in shops. Several had examples and mined gem quality ones set in jewelry, which are actually a  completely different stone, but the best resource for us was Planet Yachats. For $1 each, I bought some samples. They are white rocks that look like they have a dusting of powdered sugar on them. I hope to go back down on the beach tomorrow morning to look for them again now that I know what to look for. This morning the beach in front of the hotel was almost all rocks and not really much real sand. It was beautiful except for all the washed up and creepy giant kelp! We also visited a knitting shop called Ball & Skein and while I looked at some books, and kits and patterns, we didn’t buy anything. By now it was around 2pm and while still a little early for our single PM meal, we wanted to catch the 3:45 Building the Dream film at the Hearst Visitor’s Center and pick up our tour tickets.

We drove up to Moonstone Beach Bar & Grill for their Sunday Brunch. I had Eggs Benedict for around $15 and it included a glass of champagne. It was delicious and generously portioned. Clay had the fried fish platter for about the same price which also included the champagne and they offered a refill on the glass which was already a generous pour. Clay liked the big oysters. He saw a plate on the half shell go by, which was on the menu as an appetizer and wished he’d gotten it. We shared a molten chocolate cake with ice cream and it was big and delish.

We bought our Hearst tour tickets online back in October for $36pp. Good thing because of the 6 evening tours tonight they still had space in only one at 6:50pm or so. Our Evening Tour tickets entitled us to a discount on the film for $6pp. Of course, you could buy the DVD for less for 2 people and see it anytime, just sayin'. Clay found some smashed penny machines and they were the crank kind he is used to instead of the electric ones they had at Disneyland. Mostly those smashed pennies cost 50 cents, but these cost $1.01! Talk about a premium! We wound up with some bus tour from Bakersfield of 40 people on our tour. That’s the bad news. The good news is that since it was so many people, they divided us into 3 groups and only the 15 of us who were not with the Bakersfield folks were a separate group.

It was interesting, but we never really had a good view of the outside of the building except from Hwy. 1. Or so it seemed to me. I thought you'd be able to see it from the Visitor's Center, but couldn't.  Now, this may have been because of it being a night tour and so cold that they didn’t keep us out longer than they had to, but I was underwhelmed. I had heard of San Simeon and Hearst Castle for so many years and it is so remote that I thought I would never actually see it in person, I guess my expectations were just too high. It may also have to do with the fact that it was never actually finished. It just didn’t really compare well in my mind to Biltmore or Chinqua-Penn in NC. Anyway, it was still a good day.

We needed both gas and air in the tires on the way back to the hotel around 8:30pm and went into Cambria. We stopped at the first station, a Shell, that we came to and I went in and bought a pint of vanilla Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to have with Clay’s microwaved Olallieberry pie back in the room. It was delicious! Heavenly!

Tomorrow we have to drive back to LAX. We will spend the night at the Radisson Hotel by LAX so we can return the rental car and get to the airport easily on Tuesday morning. So, this is just about the end of my 55^th birthday trip. It has been a good one!

Photos