As part of my attempt to visit as many people as I can before I go moving off to Switzerland, I headed up to San Jose to visit my brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew for a weekend. On the Monday following that weekend, Josh flew up to meet me in NorCal for a few days of sight-seeing.
Friday evening I got in, had dinner with the family, and did some catching up. No pictures from then.
On Saturday we got up in the morning and headed to the Discovery Museum. Much to my dismay, I'd forgotten my camera, but my phone had a decent camera in it, so I took a few snapshots. Gavin, my nephew, is the one closest to the camera. Larry, my brother, is the only non-child in the picture, in the back. He's holding my neice, Hannah, who is hard to see.
Irine, my sister-in-law, had plans during the day, so it was just Larry and the kids and I. But in the evening they had a babysitter for the kids and we went out for dinner, drinks, and a movie. We saw the critically acclaimed "No Country For Old Men." This movie was good, but I really would never have called it "best picture." And fucking hell, the first 1/3rd of it was painfully slow.
Larry and the kids and I headed off to the Montery Bay Aquarium in the morning to give Irine a few hours to write some stuff she needed to get done for work. Much to my dismay, I forgot my camera again, so I have no good pictures of this. But it's always fun to see the kids in awe of the fish. We returned with lunch for everyone and spent the afternoon hanging around. We made a trip to the mall at one point because the kids wanted to get out but it was too rainy to go to the park. Sadly the playground in the mall was closed. Why they would close it, is beyond me. Anyway, that evening I snapped some pictures with my camera so I could at least have a few good pictures of the family.
On Monday morning I picked Josh up from the airport and we headed to the Winchester House. If you're not familiar with it, it's the house built by Sarah Winchester, wife to the second president of the Winchester corporation (yes, the one that makes the guns). She was quite loony. The house has doors that open to walls, stairs that go into roofs, and other wacky stuff.
After her husband died, a psychic told her that to make up for the deaths that Winchester guns had caused she needed to build for the rest of her life. So she moved to San Jose, bought a few hundred acres and started construction. Construction crews worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until the day she died.
We start with a few pictures of the courtyard (and one of Josh making a ridiculous pose).
Once the tour of the mansion started, we saw our first door-to-nowhere. Note the wall behind the door. This place is full of these.
Next up, we have the staircase that goes all the way to the roof for no reason. There's only one of these, so enjoy.
Next is several pictures of a room she used purely for storage. There's tens, if not hundereds of thousands of dollars of stained glass (valued then, which today would be millions) alone, not to mention all the other supplies.
In the next picture, notice the riser-stairs. Each stair is only slightly above the previous one. This was because Mrs. Winchester had bad arthritis and couldn't lift her legs much. That staircase circles around *several* times to go up only one story.
The next pictures are a storage area and a two rooms made up to be what they think they might have looked like (all the furniture was taken when Mrs. Winchester died).
And this is one of those odd rooms that you can't imagine would actually be useful.
And speaking of not useful, check out this really useless littly nook. It's barely big enough for, say, 2 brooms. Apparently when there's children on the tour they love to try to hide in here.
Next up, we have the only bathroom in the house with a shower. After Mrs. Winchester died, all of the furniture was taken by people in her will, so there's no toilet, and no fixtures, but it's clearly a bathroom. The funny thing is that shower is designed to spray you from all sides - if you're 4'10" as she was. Anyway, Mrs. Winchester was a huge fan of spider-web patterns - hence these windows.
Here's a dumb-waiter - and a large one at that! It was hand-powered, with counter-weights.
Some random rooms made up as they might have been made up in her day.
This is a close up picture of the walls. The walls were covered in this patterned sheeting. If you look back up to the pictures of storage, there is one picture with big rolls of something - it's this.
Here are two interesting pictures. They are both from the "seance" room. Mrs. Winchester would go for several hours a day to commune with the spirit world. The first picture was one of 13 windows in the room (she was a big fan of the number 13) pointing to a shaft that looked down into one of the areas the servants worked in. The second is another "door to nowhere." It needs to an open shaft above a sink in the kitchen.
This is the only radiator left in the house - that's Josh standing next to it for comparison.
This is an original phone box! Not an original phone though.
Some random pictures...
These 3 pictures are really neat because the tiles around the fireplaces are original and, apparently, very expensive.
This sink was imported - I think from France. But it only had one overflow whole, so she drilled 12 more in it.
Note this... glass covered hole in the floor, surrounded by a railing. Since the room we were standing in is on the top floor and is mostly glass, this sort of acts as a skylight - but still, odd.
This is one of her "call buttons." The house is built with call buttons all over the house that lead to a large box in the middle of the house (where the servants did a lot of their work). When she pushed a button a card with the number of the room she was in would pop up in the box. This was before the house had electricity (even though she was one of the first to have her house wired for electricity in the area), so it was all battery-operated.
Some more scenes from around the house...
And here is the greatest "door to nowhere." It's labeled as such because it's a door on the outside wall of the second floor. If you walk out this door, you fall a long way to the ground. Ah, insanity!
Some more beauty...
This picture shows a moon shaped bush in the lawn that Mrs. Winchester designed. Interestingly the lower point points to the room she died in. Anyway, she felt that shape had mystical power.
At this point, my camera's battery died. So the rest of the pictures from today are from my phone's camera, which, sadly is just not as good. But it sufficed.
This picture is one of my favorites. This is the top of the chimney that the majority of the fireplaces feed into. Note that it's not done. Or, perhaps the roof was just a few inches higher than they expected. Or perhaps it was because this was exactly 13 bricks less than complete. Who knows why, but because of this, most of the fireplaces in the house are unusable.
This window is the most expensive in the house, costing $200,000, which would be almost $3 million in today's money! Just for a window!
More from the house...
The drains in the sinks were also a spider-web pattern. With 13 holes.
The eagle statue here was delivered on the day Mrs. Winchester died and was still in a box. They saw fit to put it here.
And the final room in on the "Master Tour" is where Mrs. Winchester often ate lunch.
After the Master Tour, we walked around the gardens and other open buildings while we waited for the Behind the Scenes tour to start. Some random parts in the garage...
Remember the cresent plant from before? Here it is close-up.
Ah, and the awesome door to nowhere that lead to an outside drop - this is the other side of it.
The lawn was fanstastic and had some great fountains.
And then we started the Behind the Scenes tour. This tour began in the stable. The second picture below shows several spare doors that Mrs. Winchester had that the state still uses to replace doors.
Some of the most powerful water pumps of the time.
After Mrs. Winchester's death the place was opened to the public but not kept up by anyone. As such it got pretty beaten up and the many exotic plants she had died. One of the few original plant life left is this tree which has a completely split tree-trunk, which is very, very cool to see.
This machine is, as you can see on the label, used to separate grain.
This is not original, but fits in well. One of the gardeners did this in honor of Mrs. Winchester's love of the number 13 (which pops up all over the house).
One of the things the state did when they took over was paint the areas that were left unfinished by Mrs. Winchester black to differentiate them. During the 1906 earthquake when she determined the gods felt she was spending too much money on the front of the house, this chimney was damaged and she left it so. Hence, it's painted black.
This was a bird cage that Mrs. Winchester kept. It apparently had all kinds of exotic birds from all over the world. Note the small furnace. That's the bottom of the aforementioned useless chimney.
This is hard to see, but at the top, behind the frame, you can see what used to be outside of the house. She would just add rooms by building them up against the outside of the house. What you see here, is a blue-ish tile. This room - believed to be an unfinished second ballroom - is one of the only places were they can see an older exterior wall without destroying parts of the house.
Most of my basement pictures didn't come out, so I just deleted them. I kept the following two. The first one is very difficult to make out, but it's a cage inside which was several batteries that powered the house's call buttoms. The second is hardened ash from the large furnace.
Again, all the black here was the beginning of a expansion that never was finished.
This is the front of the house. A door that was basically never used. Mrs. Winchester never left, and no one else was allowed to use that door.
These last few pictures are from the Arms Museum. Some really amazing things here. In particular, check out the posters.
After that, we headed up to San Francisco and walked around Haight-Ashbury, bought a few things, and then headed to Tommy's Joynt for dinner. Then it was home for sleep.
Tuesday we got up and headed up to San Francisco. The first stop was Lombard St., the "crookedest" street in the world. Pictures from here on out are again taken by my camera.
After that, it was off to Fisherman's Wharf to sight-see. Check out how big their fire hydrants are!
After walking around a bit, we ate at Wipeout, a cool surf-n-turf place on Pier 39 (part of Fisherman's Wharf). Here are pictures of that, the wharf, and the general area.
The sea-lions climb up on these floating planks and ... grunt. It's a pretty interesting sight.
The sky was gorgeous that day...
We went to go checkout Alcatraz around 4pm, but the last boat had already gone, so we decided to check it out tomorrow. For dinner we found a nice Italian seafood place.
Sunday we got up and headed straight to the doc to catch a boat to Alcatraz. We caught one at 12:45pm. While it was Josh's first visit, I had been there once before. Nonetheless, it was great to see it again. It really is an amazing place to visit with a vast history.
After some quick lunch at the Boudin cafe (a SF bakery famous for their sourdough bread), we headed to Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower. We had no intention of going up in Coit Tower, but we wanted to see the view from the hill.
Finally it was time to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. There were breathtaking views from there. Some pictures to take note of below: The metal twisted-strand cables in comparison to Josh's arm (they're huge), the amazing sunset (I'm really proud of those pictures), the size of the tube/pipe that all of those twisted-strand cables hang from, and of course, my panoramic shot of the San Francisco coastline.
After that it was back to the airport and home.