Unfortunately, today was our last day in California. We had a 4:20 PM flight home out of San Jose. My DH wanted to go see the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. I wasn’t too thrilled with this idea, but is was on the way. While I was doing research I stumbled across the Winchester Mystery House. I had heard about and seen this house on various Travel Channel and America’s Castle specials. What I didn’t realize was that it was only 4 minutes from the San Jose airport. Now this interested me. My DH wasn’t as keen.
We had breakfast, checked out, loaded the car and headed up the PCH 1 to Santa Cruz. While the boardwalk has free admission, we had to pay $10 to park.
The day was kind of gloomy and cool with the marine layer and we arrived before anything was really open. They were having a Beach Soccer tournament going on so there were a lot of kids running around in soccer outfits. We walked the entire boardwalk out to the beach near the pier when we spotted seals in the water and started hearing “Orf, orf, orfs”.
After closer inspection we discovered there to be many California Sea Lions hanging out under the pier on platforms within the water.
We walked to the pier and investigated. The seals were taking siestas on the platforms, some in huge piles with one on top of the other and if one moved or another seal came up on the platform and rocked the "boat" they all would put up a ruckus as if to say, "Hey, I'm trying to sleep here!"
We were also intrigued by the various sea creatures living on the pylons of the pier.
I have to admit, watching the seals at this close range was more exciting than the Boardwalk and made the whole side trip worth it. It’s fun to see sea animals at the zoo or in aquariums, but it is something else to see them in their “natural” environment.
After we got our fill of Sea Lions, the Boardwalk opened and there were noticeably more people milling about.
However, we had our fill and were ready to move on. It was too early to go to the airport, so I pitched the Mystery House again. This time DH said ‘Why not?”
We arrived at the house just about 12:00 PM.
The guided tours of the mansion last 65 minutes. Fortunately, the Winchester Mystery House mansion tours start every 15 minutes, so we got on the 12:45 tour which would get us through by 2:00 PM. While we waited for our tour to begin we grabbed some lunch at the very over priced food counter at the mansion. The food wasn’t bad, just expensive. The sodas were $4.00 alone.
The tour started out with a little history, which I won’t bore you with here, except to say that Mrs. Winchester had a lot of money and was a little eccentric.
She was told by a medium to purchase a house and keep building on it to appease the spirits of all the people killed by the Winchester Rifle. So that, in a nutshell, is what she did, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 30 some odd years. For those of you not familiar with the house, it is huge, with doors that open to walls, staircases that end at ceilings and cabinets and cupboards that are only deep enough to hold a piece of paper and that’s about it.
My DD loved it. My favorite part was all of the stained glass windows. Mrs. Winchester had them shipped in from Tiffany’s of New York and they were gorgeous. Mrs. Winchester was very superstitious and her favorite number was 13, so you see that motif a lot throughout the house.
We finished the tour, literally ran through the garden
and left just in time to return our rental car and check in at the airport for our flight home. Thus, ending our "Awesome" trip to Central California.
Thanks for reading along. I hoped you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
I hope you have a wonderful trip to California.
If you can manage it, I would definintely recommend going back, even for a quick visit. 
