![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
May. 30th, 2006 07:29 am
more weekend memories
I'm up way too early, so I thought I'd finish writing about the rest of the weekend. I tried writing in my paper journal, but wow, I forgot how tiring it was to hand-write stuff, and how much faster it is to type. I have a doctor's appointment today, and I could have slept in, but my apartment won't let me sleep later than 6:30 am.
Anyway, we went to the Winchester Mystery House on Saturday. It was okay. The story of the house is that Sarah Winchester built the house in order to appease the spirits of those who had been killed by Winchester rifles. So the house was in constant construction, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year until she died of heart failure. Apparently it was easier than not making any more guns. Or becoming a nice person. The house is a lot smaller than I remembered it, and their touristy souvenirs were kind of crappy, and they sold a lot of things that were not actually associated with the house. We bought the combined tour, which gave us a tour of the estate and a "behind-the-scenes" tour. Our first tour guide was not very good; she left out a lot of stuff that the second tour guide mentioned, like the fact that all but one of the posts in the house were upside-down. She had only been working for about three weeks, she said, and it showed. The second tour showed us some of the outside, and the basement, in which food was kept cool, and other stuff. The second guide was pretty good, but I was tired and couldn't really follow him very much.
I had memories of the Hearst Castle in my head, and being much more impressed by what I saw there. It's not really a fair comparison, I suppose, since the Mystery House's appeal is more in the fact that it's built so weirdly and there are a lot of thirteens everywhere. And supposedly there are ghosts. Some of the wallpaper and furnishings are pretty, but nothing spectacular. On the other hand, Hearst Castle is cheaper, and beautiful.
I wonder if the Friday the 13th or Halloween tours are more worth it, so you can get the creepy ambience. It might make it more interesting.
On Sunday we went to the Jelly Belly factory for a free tour and some free candy. It's all the way up in Fairfield, off 80-E. (My roomie's really into touristy stuff. I'm totally fine with that - some things are touristy for a reason.) If you go on a weekday, you get to see the machines actually sorting the candy and working. But since we were there on Sunday, they weren't in operation, and we watched some videos of how the Jelly Belly beans were made. There was a lot of thanks to Ronald Reagan for making them famous. The tour's about an hour, and they give them every fifteen minutes, from nine to four, seven days a week, excepting holidays. Definitely worth it if you're a Jelly Belly fan.
What's in a Jelly Belly? Sugar, corn syrup, sugar, sugar, sugar. It was pretty cool to see how they made stuff. The only thing I wish I could have seen more of was how they came up with off-the-wall flavors like sardine, vomit, etc.
My roomie tried vomit (tasted like pizza), sardine (blech), soap (yep, tastes like soap). There's a sample bar when you first walk in and you can ask to try whatever flavors you want for free. It was pretty neat.
And then we came back in time to have lunch and watch X-3 with Mark. (My roomie and I are early birds. Mark is not, which occasionally drives me crazy.) I'm starting to think way too much about X-3, but the writing is still driving me crazy. It's not even like I watched the cartoon much or read the comic books, but the inconsistencies are still driving me crazy. I could let it go for X-2, because X-2 was actually good enough that I could overlook the other stuff. And please kill the love triangles.
I don't know why I love comic book movies so much, especially when I don't really like reading American comic books, but I do, especially when they're well-done, like X-2 or Spiderman. I'm really looking forward to Superman Returns.
Anyway, we went to the Winchester Mystery House on Saturday. It was okay. The story of the house is that Sarah Winchester built the house in order to appease the spirits of those who had been killed by Winchester rifles. So the house was in constant construction, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year until she died of heart failure. Apparently it was easier than not making any more guns. Or becoming a nice person. The house is a lot smaller than I remembered it, and their touristy souvenirs were kind of crappy, and they sold a lot of things that were not actually associated with the house. We bought the combined tour, which gave us a tour of the estate and a "behind-the-scenes" tour. Our first tour guide was not very good; she left out a lot of stuff that the second tour guide mentioned, like the fact that all but one of the posts in the house were upside-down. She had only been working for about three weeks, she said, and it showed. The second tour showed us some of the outside, and the basement, in which food was kept cool, and other stuff. The second guide was pretty good, but I was tired and couldn't really follow him very much.
I had memories of the Hearst Castle in my head, and being much more impressed by what I saw there. It's not really a fair comparison, I suppose, since the Mystery House's appeal is more in the fact that it's built so weirdly and there are a lot of thirteens everywhere. And supposedly there are ghosts. Some of the wallpaper and furnishings are pretty, but nothing spectacular. On the other hand, Hearst Castle is cheaper, and beautiful.
I wonder if the Friday the 13th or Halloween tours are more worth it, so you can get the creepy ambience. It might make it more interesting.
On Sunday we went to the Jelly Belly factory for a free tour and some free candy. It's all the way up in Fairfield, off 80-E. (My roomie's really into touristy stuff. I'm totally fine with that - some things are touristy for a reason.) If you go on a weekday, you get to see the machines actually sorting the candy and working. But since we were there on Sunday, they weren't in operation, and we watched some videos of how the Jelly Belly beans were made. There was a lot of thanks to Ronald Reagan for making them famous. The tour's about an hour, and they give them every fifteen minutes, from nine to four, seven days a week, excepting holidays. Definitely worth it if you're a Jelly Belly fan.
What's in a Jelly Belly? Sugar, corn syrup, sugar, sugar, sugar. It was pretty cool to see how they made stuff. The only thing I wish I could have seen more of was how they came up with off-the-wall flavors like sardine, vomit, etc.
My roomie tried vomit (tasted like pizza), sardine (blech), soap (yep, tastes like soap). There's a sample bar when you first walk in and you can ask to try whatever flavors you want for free. It was pretty neat.
And then we came back in time to have lunch and watch X-3 with Mark. (My roomie and I are early birds. Mark is not, which occasionally drives me crazy.) I'm starting to think way too much about X-3, but the writing is still driving me crazy. It's not even like I watched the cartoon much or read the comic books, but the inconsistencies are still driving me crazy. I could let it go for X-2, because X-2 was actually good enough that I could overlook the other stuff. And please kill the love triangles.
I don't know why I love comic book movies so much, especially when I don't really like reading American comic books, but I do, especially when they're well-done, like X-2 or Spiderman. I'm really looking forward to Superman Returns.
