"Is this real? Or is this just a ride?" Bill Hicks

Hey! I'm back! Sorry for the delay, it's been a crazy old couple of days, but with Swiss Family Dysfunctional on the road, what's new!? So, what have you missed? Oh, yes, Hearst Castle. Well you really missed something there, I haven't been quite that jealous in a long time, it really tested my Buddhist principles, and then some! The night before, when we were still in Santa Barbara, we got back to the trailer to find it beset with ants that had followed the water hose up from the ground outside into the RV interior. Seriously gross. Fortunately, they hadn't got as far as the cupboards and Dad ran up to the shop to buy some ant killer. In the meantime, I forgot my Buddhist 'no harm to yourself or others' principle and Amy and I stamped on every ant in sight. I came very close to knowing how Lisa Clark felt when her house was beset with mice!

We get up early to drive up the coast from Santa Barbara (how I loved Santa Barbara, so laid back, so luxurious, such a huge homeless population, such a massive divide between the rich and poor.....oops, talked myself clean out of that one, didn't I?) to San Simeon, where Hearst Castle is found.

All we have to do before we leave is book the campsite for that night and we're off. Everyone is up on time, Amy does her make-up in a record-breaking 6 hours (kidding, it was only five and a half, she decided she just wouldn't sleep so we could leave on schedule) and Dad whips out the mobile to give the site a ring, located at Laguna Seca, Monterey County. This was when we hit upon our first snag.

"No, sorry there's a big rally here, and we're fully booked."

Well, that's no panic, we've got Google up and there are loads of RV parks up that way. Hundreds! Thousands! One of them has to be free, with room at the inn for our teeny tiny RV. Doesn't it?

Well, actually, no. None of them are. Which means that we're driving up the coast on a three and a half hour drive to Hearst Castle (which, being clever little cub scouts we've booked in advance on a one o'clock tour), which lasts two hours in itself and then we have nowhere to stay. DANGER! DANGER! I repeat, Houston, we have nowhere to stay. But that's ok, because I'm not panicking. No one's panicking. Who said anything about panicking? Everything is fine. Eventually we get through to a site that says they might have a site (at which point, I am minded to reply, "What do you mean, might, don't you know? Go out there and take a f*$?ing look, you mindless moron!" but realise that they might change their minds about having us at all) and we're to phone back at 11 o'clock. Everyone breathes a sigh of collective relief well strictly speaking, Dad and I do, Amy hasn't even realised that anything is wrong. She's been curling her hair with tongs the whole time, part of the daily 'getting ready' ritual (how I wish I was kidding!), and can neither receive nor impart information prior to midday. Well she does grunt occasionally, but no one is ever quite sure what she is trying to convey - we just smile and nod uncertainly until she shouts "GOD!!!" and stamps back into the bathroom.

So we get on the road to the Castle. At eleven, we ring the campsite and, yes, you've guessed it dear reader, they haven't got anywhere for us to stay. By this time, though, we're really close to the castle and we genuinely don't mind. My Dad (it will be those of you who know him that will know what a big deal this next statement is) says, "Oh well, I'm sure something will turn up." I was so surprised I lost consciousness for a moment. True story.

When we arrive at the Castle, we take a bus trip up to the Castle site itself. This is a pretty terrifying experience for me (and as it turned out, Amy too) because the Castle is set high up on a hilltop (Hearst liked the view) and the 5 mile, 15 minute coach ride takes you on a single lane route, higher and higher, with bare hillside and steep drops to the side for most of the trip. Whilst I did not doubt the exceptional skills of the bus driver to get us up and down this road, at times the drop to the right was terrifying and I could not bear to look.

The Castle itself was amazing. William Randolph Hearst was one of the famous Hearst family (now the family is most remembered for his grand-daughter, Patty Hearst, the kidnap victim turned bank robber), a newspaper magnate, who - reading between the lines of the exhibition all about him - was also a bit of an amoral shit. The Orson Welles film, Citizen Kane, was based on Hearst's life story. Hearst called the castle, 'the ranch', but it is set in a 240,000 acre estate and it is the result of a 28 year collaboration between Hearst and architect Julia Morgan, who was the first woman to receive a certificate in architecture from the French Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux Arts. The amount of time it took paid off, as the castle has numerous guest houses included in the estate and two swimming pools, one inside (the Roman pool) and one outside (the Neptune Pool). The Castle and Hearst entertained many famous guests, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Winston Churchill and Clark Gable, as well as a slew of famous authors, including HG Wells, Somerset Maugham, F Scott Fitzgerald and George Bernard Shaw, who is reputed to have commented about the Castle, "This is what God would have built, if he had had the money."

Visitors are taken around the site by guides, and ours was a tall, middle-aged man called Bob. Maybe every visitor says this about their guide, but ours was definitely the best one. He had an exceptionally dry sense of humour and a gently teasing manner that warmed me to him immediately. He also knew everything there was to know about the Castle and Hearst, the man, or The Chief, as his staff called him. The house is beyond opulent. We started out at the Neptune Pool, which is huge, warm, and very blue. Great views across the rest of the estate, too. Hearst was really into animals and had his own zoo on site, including bears, african deer, lions, a cheetah and herds of zebra. The bears, lion and cheetah are long gone, though the bear cages remain in situ, but descendants of the deer and zebra still roam the hills of the remaining estate. I kid you not. We saw the zebra when we were driving up Highway 101 to get to the castle - they really freaked us out as we could not, for the life of us, figure out what they were doing there, grazing calmly alongside the cows!

Then we went into the house and toured the upper floors, including more guest bedrooms than I can remember - my favourite was the one with two paintings in the ceiling of Luna, goddess of the moon and Apollo, god of the sun; this was on two levels, the bedroom up above with Luna above the bed and Apollo looking down on the sitting room area - the Library (so many books, a writer's heaven, especially as there were a lot of books on writing, including one called Women Writers), the Gothic Suite and the Kitchens.

Amy said that she hates going round these sorts of houses because she likes them so much, and I see her logic here. She says that it just makes her feel jealous and I know what she means, because I would love to live there. To stay there for just a few months would be wonderful, it's a house designed for writers, imho, as there is so much to inspire, both inside and out, and the place is so big that one need never hanker for privacy. You just wander off and no one would be able to find you for about a year! The only part that did make me a little bit uncomfortable was the amount of religious imagery, which was everywhere but in Hearst's bedroom. At first I thought this was strange as Bob told us Hearst was not a religious man and rarely went to Church, but the guide explained that Hearst's wife was a strongly devout Catholic. This satisfied me for a while until later Bob told us that Millicent Hearst, his wife, spent very little time there.

"But what about all the religious icons?" someone asked.

"Oh, well, his mistress, Marian Davies, was a strong Catholic, too," replied Bob, deadpan. Contradiction, much! I'm knobbing someone else's husband (for most of their marriage, too) but I should keep in touch with my faith.

We brave the coach trip back down Death Mountain (OK, I made up the name), and back at the RV face the thorny issue of where our homeless little Beast will rest her weary engine for the night. We finally decide to head back down Highway 101 the way we have come to a park site(no hookup for water or electric and definitely no WiFi, but I'm not even bothered as long as we don't end up sleeping on the freeway) called San Simeon State Park. This turns out to be the best decision we ever made, not only because San Simeon is beautiful with a capital Byoo, but because we will only realise the next day how far away Laguna Seca is, and that the route is not the long straight road that we have become accustomed to (more of this in my next post). There is plenty of room at San Simeon when we arrive and the State Ranger who lets us through is absolutely lovely.

There are no mod cons at the park, just basic toilets and showers, but the park is a nature reserve that you can camp in basically, like the New Forest, but in America. There is a lot of wildlife roaming around, and we see two lizards, a bright blue bird, lots of circling hawks, a tiny rabbit, and best of all, the strangest rodents that have the bodies of rats, but the heads of squirrels, with long rat's tails that are all bushy like a squirrel's but long and straight like a rat's. Amy and I christen them with the highly original name, Squirrel Rats. They might sound horrible, but somehow the combi works and they are kind of cute, but nervous and easily frightened. Amy and I discovered this the first time we saw a group of them, howled with laughter because they looked so funny and they all ran away at a little under the speed of light.

Once we have settled in at the park, we take the short walk down to the beach (San Simeon is right on the coast) and I paddle in the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life. It was bloody freezing. We all take off our shoes and wander companionably along the shore. Amy and I take it in turns to walk in each other's footprints (touches of To Kill A Mockingbird there) and when we follow Dad's, we notice that one of his feet turns outward quite noticeably, perhaps a legacy of the ankle he broke years ago when he made his first parachute jump. I climb onto some rocks and read (a horror story set in a seaside town - not entirely appropriate, I kept shooting nervous glances at the Ocean) while Dad and Amy splash about in the surf until Amy's jeans and Dad's cut-off's are soaked through. We head back up the shore a while later to avoid the incoming tide and sit further up on the beach awhile (where my pashmina - thank you Kate- which I had been using as a shawl doubles up nicely as a beach blanket), watching cormorants swoop and nose-dive into the ocean for fish. They look like little pterodactyls, I can tell you with some authority because I saw one in the San Diego Museum of Natural History. After a little while, we notice something black and shiny dipping in and out of the water, not far from shore. We all stare for a bit longer and we realise that it is a seal!

Back at the RV, we have no electrical hookup and are only allowed to run the generator until nine o'clock, so entertainment is limited. I read while Amy and Dad play Uno, arguing occasionally about the rules and asking me to referee, which I refuse to do, knowing better than to get in between such quarrels. It is a peaceful and companionable evening. Just before we turn in to bed, Dad and I head outside for a fag, switching on the porch light and then almost immediately switching it off again when we see the stars. I have never seen anything like that in my life. Miles from the cityscapes, the sky is a patchwork made of sparkling points of light that takes our breath away. Amy comes out for a moment but is made nervous by the density of the darkness that surounds us (and the rustling from the bushes that I think is a lizard), but I think I would face down a grizzly bear and eight of his pals to stay under that sky awhile longer and Dad and I last the cold (me huddled under a blanket) for about half an hour or more. In the distance we can hear the roaring lullaby of the Pacific as it caresses the shore of San Simeon's beach, and I finally learn what a perfect moment with nature feels like when I see a total of three shooting stars crash and burn their way into the Earth's atmosphere.

The panic of the morning and all its insecurities, the everyday bickering of up close and personal family life, the ticking awareness that there is a hell of a big workload waiting for me back in England, and beyond all my crap, to the endless wars that signify man's inhumanity to man, all disappear in this moment, under the stars, beside the Ocean. If you could bring every world leader to this place, at this time, surely they would see that there are more important things than money, that the Universe is bigger than us, and, as Hicks said, we should "Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet." It's still true, Bill, I can't even call that experience priceless without the readers all thinking of Mastercard.

After a time of silent staring at the sky (waiting for an intelligent life form to finally show up - they didn't), we say goodnight to the stars and the distant ocean and slide back into the belly of the Beast to sleep.