Hearst Castle

One of the pools

The entrance to one of the guest cottages.
The main house
A little pond outside
The outside of one of the guest cottages
Part of the gardens (the pathway to the main house)
A view looking down on the pool
The Front of a guest cottage
Looking down on the ocean

While on our vacation to Pismo beach, we went to visit Hearst Castle. It is a pretty impressive building. It has some really cool pools (one of them is lined with gold tiles in the pool, and on the ground that we walked on), a ton of antiques (we are talking 1800 year old antiques), wood carved ceilings, wood carved walls, ancient artifacts and beautiful gardens. It was an interesting tour. The kids enjoyed it, but did not LOVE it. The main castle has 118 bedrooms, there are a couple of guest "cottages", one has 54 rooms and the other one has... I can't remember how many, but a lot. There is a caretakers "ranch house" and a few other impressive buildings on the site. It was fun to look at and see some things that we would otherwise not have the opportunity to see. There are FIVE different tours, and we went on the "beginners" tour which lasted approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. We only saw a very limited amount of the buildings, and even less of the gardens, but it was still pretty cool. Travis and I had a talk with our kids on the way back from the castle about how cool the building was, but where would they rather live? Our house, or the castle? We talked about why our home was better than the castle and how worldliness could consume us. We talked about how wherever our family was, that is where our home was and that is where we wanted to be... it did not matter if we had to live in a tent, or if we were in a castle, as long as we were together- that was the important thing. The kids thought the buildings were pretty cool, but before Travis and I even started asking questions, they all said that they would not want to live there. It was a fun discussion and we enjoyed our time at Hearst Castle.