So...we woke up and packed...always a fun time... and checked out of our wonderful Marriot room.
We headed down towards San Jose, stopping to eat at Fudd Ruckers, which reminded me of Flakey Jakes, where Betty used to take us.
Anyway, Grant gor an Ostrich burger and I got a cow burger, and we loaded our fries up with nacho cheese sauce...plus I got a strawberry shake and Grant got a kona coffee shake and it was one of those perfectly heavenly meals...
We arrived at the Winchester Mystery House early in the afternoon and we did the estate tour. It was really quite interesting...for those of you that don't know the story, here is my brief summary...
Sarah Pardee married the guy who owned the Winshester Rifle Company (his father started the business and he continued it, and improved it, particularly by making a quality repeating rifle...)
Sarah Pardee Winchester had a daughter who died 20 days after she was born, and many years later her husband died of Tuberculosis.
As the story goes, she was deeply grieved for the untimley losses of her family, and went to see a psychic. This psychic told her that her family was being haunted by the spirits of all of those whose lives were lost by the Winchester Rifle, and if she wanted to live (and not fall to the curse) She would need to travel to where the sun touches the sea (west) and build a house for the spirits to dwell in. Here is the kicker, Sarah interepreted this to mean that as long as she continued to build the house, the spirits would not harm her...
So sarah came out west and bought a farm house, and began building. For the next 32 years, she had carpenters build the house non stop, 24 hours a day, adding rooms on to rooms, building new rooms around existing rooms, and creating a mansion with all sorts of oddities...Tiffany stain glass windows built into walls with rooms on both sides of the wall so that no sunlight touched the room, staircases that go into the ceiling, a window in the floor, a chimney that travels four stories up and stops just a foot and a half below the ceiling (there is an old myth that spirits enter and exit the house through chimnies, so perhaps Sarah was trying to confuse them...?).
Sarah held nightly seinces to talk to the spirits, and these talks led to her hand drawn plans for the carpenters to build the next day. As such, there are no blue prints and no formal apporvals for anything in the house.
Other interesting things...Sarah had a fascination with spiderweb designs, as evidenced in many of the stain glass windows. in addition, she was obsessed with the number 13...many staircases had 13 stairs, there were 13 bathrooms (and 13 windows in the 13 bathrooms) She had 13 palms lining the front driveway...oh, yeah, and another old wives tale says that if you install a post upside down in ahouse, it will bring you good luck. Every post in Sarah's estate was installed upside down.
(By the way, besides the large sum of money she recieved as being the heress to the Winchester fortune, she recieved revenues from the companies stocks and bonds which amounted to $1000 a day. ..in case you were wondering how she could afford this!)
In any case, there are so many interesting things, it is definatly worth checking out!
After our tour, we had some time before a flight, but we headed to the airport anyway, to see if we could fly Standby on an earlier flight. We got on (the flisht had about 20 empty seats) So after being subject to a polite but thourough body and barry on baggage search (yup, we got pulled aside...probably becasue we switched flights...) We got on a plane about 40 minutes after dropping our car off at the airport, and even got to move to the emergency row becasue nobody wanted to sit there. Sweet....
All in all, it was a great trip...have I mentioned how much I love traveling with Grant?
Other interesting things about the house...
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