TriumphAnt

(All photos, except this post's bird, and the book cover -- you'll know it when you see it -- and, as always, the ones reached by a link, are by yours truly.)

The Olallieberry Inn is a Cambrian jewel.

As we drove south past the entrance to the Hearst estate, about six miles farther on we turned off Highway 1 into the picturesque town of Cambria. After driving almost the full length of its main street until we were just about out the far end of town, we saw a massive Sequoia gracing a front yard on the right, and a sign telling us that we had arrived at the Olallieberry Inn Bed and Breakfast.


Our priorities in a B&B are not too complicated: a warm welcome; well-maintained accommodation in a quiet setting; some of the character of the community; freshly made, high quality breakfasts. Bonus features might include an environment where guests just seem to naturally mingle and swap stories of their day’s discoveries; a knowledgeable host on the premises – someone who plainly loves the responsibilities of running a haven for travelers from near and far. All of these are present in large quantity at the Olallieberry Inn, a property that was first erected as a private home in 1873.

We even came home late one evening to find ourselves face-to-face with a deer browsing in this garden.
Now how bucolic is that?

Co-owner and host Marjorie Ott (just “Marjorie” from the moment she says hello) is a fountain of knowledge of Cambria’s many sights and attractions, and was only too happy to point us to places that might be outside the “recommended highlights” offered in guidebooks to the area. One example: wishing a more leisurely start to one of our days there we took one of Marjorie’s suggestions and found ourselves strolling on a magnificent nearby section on the California Coast Trail that took us along the crest of a cliff from which we could watch the Pacific waves pounding into shore while a vee of pelicans slowly flew past just above the waves.
Slung from a waist “fanny pack” was a pair of Bushnell binoculars that Marjorie had loaned us to take along for the walk.

Of the Olallieberry’s daily breakfast starts, suffice to say that Marjorie and her kitchenmeister Larry have been asked for their recipes so often, they have produced a cookbook containing all of their very best to date – breakfasts, daily complimentary hors d’oeuvres and dessert offerings that are served each afternoon at 5. And if by some highly unlikely outcome the daily fresh-made hot special and freshly-squeezed orange juice had not been up to the task of (*buuuurrrrppp!*) filling us up, a sideboard was always stocked with homemade Olallieberry granola and a bowl of fresh fruit.

The olallieberry itself, despite sounding like something straight out of Beatrix Potter, is a real fruit. It’s the product of multiple crosses, i.e., it is known most directly as a cross between a loganberry and a youngberry, but each of those in turn is also a cross: between a blackberry and raspberry (loganberry), and a blackberry and dewberry (youngberry).

It’s a good thing we had only limited space in our luggage, otherwise we’d probably have acquired several pots of the olallieberry jam and bottles of olallieberry syrup and olallieberry salsa that were on sale from a heavily stocked cabinet in the breakfast dining room. As it was, we contented ourselves with buying a copy of their cookbook because the breakfast entrees and several of the wine & hors d’oeuvres we had (including, you guessed it: an olallieberry almond paté and a baked brie with an olallieberry compote topping) were all, in a word, amazing.

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It’s nice to bump into a group of Americans for whom “FOE” has positive connotations. Back along the highway from Cambria towards the Hearst castle gates was a must-stop pull-off where we spent a good hour or so in the company of these creatures.
They are elephant seals, so named because a fully grown adult male has a bulbous nose that overhangs his face in a manner that obviously suggested “pachyderm” to those who were first responsible for naming the animal.

And apparently they return to this very beach, year after year after year, to bask (as these were) and, a few weeks later, to engage in the age-old Darwinian struggle to stake out a section of beach, gather a harem, fight like hell with constantly-challenging young bull seals to hold onto them, mate and then leave the job of raising the kids to the many moms.
These ones are almost entirely females with a few juvenile males scattered among them, but the day we were there the beach’s population included one enormous older male whose presence was puzzling to the beach’s monitors. (Well let’s see… be hundreds of miles away in the freezing ocean with a bunch of ever more grumpy males, or be basking on a warm beach with hundreds of females just coming into heat… decisions, decisions.)

Oh – FOE? Elephant Seal Beach (its local label. Officially, it’s the Piedras Blancas rookery) is monitored and interpreted for visitors by a corps of dedicated volunteers who collectively are known as the Friends Of the Elephant seal – FOE. They have a highly informative website, here.

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William Randolph Hearst was a bazillionaire whose heyday was in the 1920s and 30s and who made his personal fortune initially through the luck of a large inheritance. But he sustained and multiplied it through a work ethic that saw him turn the purchase of a single medium – the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 – into a vast publishing and multi-media empire.

Combine this with a personal passion for the affairs of celebrities from all walks of life, and an exploding public interest in the same thing, and the result is the dazzling history of the Hearst “castle” at San Simeon.

There are a half dozen Google suggestions in the foregoing that will give you all the background – probably much more of it, in all likelihood – than you could ever want to know about the man and his California home. So I won’t be getting into a lot of the official history here.

My other half had already been to the estate, during a previous visit to California, in that state’s blinding daylight sun. In the course of researching suggested activities for our trip, she discovered we would be in the area for the season’s final weekend of their two-and-a-half hour nighttime tour. So that’s what we booked.

I can’t personally speak for this experience in comparison to the daylight tour but my other half told me afterwards that the nighttime tour was definitely the more interesting one.


One of the first things that struck me about “The Ranch” (Hearst’s preferred label) is that despite its geographical position roughly mid-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco, it really does seem to epitomize the description, “in the middle of nowhere”.
Although its entrance gates are directly beside the highway, the estate itself is a five mile climb up a winding road to a distant hilltop. Once through the highway gates, you park your car in a huge parking lot (because that five-mile climb is available only to California State Park shuttle buses) and make your way into an enormous Visitors Centre.

In the Centre, visitors will find the requisite souvenir shop, cafeteria and washrooms, in addition to the multi-bay shuttle bus departure area that resembles a bus terminal in a medium-sized city. (Right off the bat I noticed that, at the time of day when the property is winding down to its last tours, the Centre was also very lightly populated. Because the night-time tour also runs from 9 to 11:30 or thereabouts, there is also a distinct lack of energetic kids rushing hither and thither.)

Shortly after we boarded the bus, the driver welcomed us and then switched the bus’s sound system over to a pre-recorded travelogue that turned out to be (for me) a delight. It was an artful blend of information about The Ranch punctuated with period music from the Roaring Twenties. We were told that we were going to experience something of what Hearst’s celebrity visitors experienced, admittedly with a few comfort upgrades -- the first of which was to take the climb in an air-conditioned bus with soft fabric seats and comfort-glide shock absorbers over a modern paved drive.


You could write a book about Hearst’s San Simeon castle. In fact, several people have done just that.
One with which I came away is a fascinating look at the physical process of designing and building it, a process that, because of the sheer scope of the project and Hearst’s almost continuous mind-changes, led to a multi-year long-term professional relationship between Hearst and his architect, Julia Morgan.

Here’s what struck us most about our tour, several impressions in no particular order.

It might very well be a requirement for all guides at The Ranch, but the man who met us and escorted us throughout our tour seemed to be extraordinarily well-informed. His presentation style was also wonderfully low-key and he seemed quite content to let the surroundings and their resident artworks radiate their own awe without injecting it into his voice.
(By way of contrast, on our last stop on the tour we joined another group and received our closing commentary from a young woman who seemed to think she should channel Rod Serling and hit us over the head with some sense of the power and control that she obviously imagined was emanating from the hilltop estate. It was pure Disney and not a little grating after our preceding two hours of quiet, information-saturated professionalism.)

In addition to the torrent of requisite facts, he also liberally peppered his tour with endlessly fascinating trivia and anecdotes.

In the Billiards Room, for example, he told us that one did not, if one wanted to return home with anything left in one’s wallet, challenge Carol Lombard to a game of pool. In another example, although it is widely known that Marion Davies was Hearst’s mistress for some three decades, what isn’t as widely known is how graciously she let the Hearst family off the hook when Hearst left controlling interest in his massive corporation to her when he died. It was an outcome that clearly could have led to a protracted, expensive war of lawyers but Davies simply offered it right back to the Hearst family in exchange for a lifetime position as a member of the corporation’s board of directors and an annual salary of $1 per year. (That’s right – one dollar.) The family, reported our guide in a new benchmark for understatement, “quickly” accepted her offer.

Even for formal dinners, the Hearst dining table was always adorned with bottles of ketchup placed at several locations along its length. Hearst apparently loved the condiment and made no bones about its presence on his table at every meal.

Despite the regular presence at the estate of Hollywood celebrities with all their known capacities to imbibe, Hearst made it clear that hard liquor was not allowed on the property and any guest displaying public drunkenness would arrive at the breakfast room the next morning to discover – not a seat at the table – but rather his or her bags sitting fully packed in the foyer and a car waiting for the drive, immediately, to the San Luis Obispo railroad station and the long -- and presumably hungover -- trip home.

Hearst, however, was not a proponent of temperance. He had draught beer taps installed in the kitchen and a cool one was always available for the asking. It was the over-consumption of alcohol that offended him.

The estate’s theatre is stunning. Every night, Hearst would show a newsreel or two, followed by a first-run movie, occasionally featuring one or another of that day’s Hollywood guests. But it had to be almost immediately captivating because if “The Chief” didn’t like it, beside his chair was a telephone directly linked to the projection booth. At a word, a less than enthralling movie would be ordered pulled from the projector, to be replaced immediately with a Marion Davies film. We didn’t see a full-length movie, but we did see a wonderful period newsreel, obviously selected because it featured Hearst himself.

As our guide noted in great amusement, Hearst was filmed urging theatre-goers to “Buy American”, a laudable directive during the Great Depression. But the entire segment was shot while he stood in front of the estate’s magnificent front gates – acquired on one of his many European antiquity buying binges – these gates apparently brought over from some Spanish monastery.

Finally, well after dark, as we were on our way down from the mountain (and missing only the armload of Ten Commandments to feel we’d actually been closer to the Lord), our shuttle driver was in the middle of a vigorous upper body workout yanking the steering wheel from one tight turn into another entirely the opposite direction. Suddenly there appeared on the road directly in front of us one of the many ruminants that call the huge Hearst estate property home.

It’s not a rare occurrence, apparently, because the driver brought the bus to a swift stop. Then she slowly crept the vehicle around the glassy-eyed creature, which clearly was hypnotized by the bright lamps. Another old adage given living truth: a deer in the headlights really is a deer in the headlights!

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Non-California digressions

What’s in a name (1)?

Recently near the end of our customary evening walk, my other half and I had stopped to chat with some neighbours when we saw another neighbour’s puppy tearing up the street towards us, his owner in hot pursuit about ten yards behind. The young canine was clearly just looking to be sociable because in seconds he was bouncing around each of us happily accepting behind-the-ear scratches and generally just being bouncy-puppy friendly until his owner caught up with him.

Partway through our subsequent conversation, I asked the pup’s owner what his name is. She replied, “Tupac… but for the Aztec king, not the American rapper.”

I’m sure it was of intense importance to the dog (even more to his owner) to know that, when she was bellowing at him to stop running away, or to get the heck out of the garden, she was addressing him as this, and not this.

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What’s in a name (2)?
Trivia time!

Quick – define “troglodyte”.

If you draw forth recollections relating to “cave dweller” and the like, you’re right smack in tune with the non-slang definitions. If you broaden your range to include its slang application to “a reclusive, reactionary, out-of-date person, especially if brutish” (From Wiktionary), then you’re also in the ballpark. If you’re a fan of novelty songs, you might also recall one about a trio or so decades ago when a band called The Jimmy Castor Bunch had a big hit with a song by that name, the tale of a lonely caveman engaged in a near-desperate search for the woman of his dreams (“Gotta find a woman; Gotta find a woman; Gotta find a woman…”) – who turned out to be a “big woman… BIG!”, named Bertha Butt (“one of the Butt sisters”).

Anyway, my point? OK, so now let’s say you’re a scholar working in the realm of scientific nomenclature and you’ve had the name “troglodyte” rattling around in your head just waiting for the right critter to come along and accept it. In fact, so taken with it are you that you have decided you would simply have to call the creature – when one finally exhibits the appearance and behavioural characteristics to merit the name – “troglodytes troglodytes”.

Ladies and gentlemen, please avert your childen’s eyes, because I now will yank the curtain aside and reveal to you the shocking power and might embodied in… “Troglodytes troglodytes!”:


No, I’m not making this up. As I first discovered from a close reading of one of my in-laws’ beautiful avian-themed placemats, it’s a winter wren. Go to Google. Click on “Images”. Enter “Troglodytes troglodytes”.)

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What’s in a message?

Here is the transcript of an actual recent series of brief e-mailed messages between me and my boss, who is a very busy man (and is on a short term fill-in position in an office in one of the other towers in our four-tower complex):

ME: “I just signed for a package addressed to you. It’s on your chair, but if you’re in a hurry for it, I’ll be happy to walk it over to your other desk right away.”

HIM: “Thanks.”

ME: “Does that mean, ‘Thanks, I don’t need it’ or “Thanks, please bring it right over’”?

HIM: “I am in a meeting on the 13th floor.”

(This located him back in our tower, which has 14 floors; the one in which he is working on the acting assignment only has 11. Notice that, despite the information we have swapped in the four messages exchanged to this point, he still hasn’t told me whether he is in immediate need of the danged package!)

ME: “OK, I’ve left it on your chair.”

Thus closing the loop by returning the thread to its starting point. And we’re Communications, fergawdssake! No wonder people view Government of Canada news releases with an expectation of the same clarity they would find in the Klingon version of The da Vinci Code.

Next time:

The Stanley Cup finds a fan in the middle of a California vineyard; sharing a common language can still leave you with nothing to talk about when the topic is shooting pigs, and “California Quirking” – a few random oddities from this trip.