If you ever get the chance to do the drives from San Francisco to Los Angeles or Vice versa make sure you take highway 1 down the coast and through the Big Sur. This is an amazing drive, with so much to see and do? One stop you cannot miss is Hearst Castle San Simeon, California, approximately 250 miles (400 km) from both Los Angeles and San Francisco.

This place is just incredible, built in 1919 for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who died in 1951, he entertained many famous people there like Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, James Stewart, Bob Hope, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, Dolores Del Rio, and Winston Churchill. Just to name a few. The story goes that on your first night there you sat next to the host, and then every night after that you moved down the table one place. By the time you got to the end of the table that was your reminder your visit is over and its’s time to go home.

I was just blown away when I first seen this place, the tour is fantastic I could just picture the parties and people, I could not believe that people actually lived like this back in the 1900’s.

Hearst castle also had the world’s largest private zoo until 1937 when William Randolph Hearst experienced great financial difficulty and the Zoo had to be dismantled. Most of animals had been placed by 1953, although Rocky Mountain elk, tahr goats, llamas, white fallow deer, zebras, Barbary sheep, and sambar deer can still been seen on the ranch today.

You definitely won’t be disappointed with the drive on highway 1 or the Tour of Hearst Castle, I loved it and I know you will to.

See You at the Airport

Mike