California Trip {Day 4}

We left Paso Robles on Wednesday morning. We stopped for donuts and coffee at a little shop that I forgot to photograph! Oh well....my coffee wasn't that great.

We also wanted to ship some more wine that we had purchased rather than dealing with it. Our hotel in Paso Robles recommended a company called Safe Haven that will come to your hotel and pick up your wine and ship it to you. We found out about it at check out, so we decided to just go directly to them with our wine. We had 4 bottles of wine and 1 bottle of olive oil. We decided to stop at Albertson's to pick up a 6th bottle. We figured that if we were sending 5 bottles already, they would probably have to use a box that would hold 6 anyway.

Now with the wine out of the way, it was time to head north to our next destination, San Jose. I can't tell you how many times I would sing "Do you know the way to San Jose" to my husband. I think he started tuning me out after a while. I was no Dionne Warwick!

We took a little detour on our way to San Jose to have lunch in Monterey at the Fisherman's Wharf.


The boats at Monterey.

We ate lunch at an Italian Seafood place called Isabella's. The chef at the restaurant, Tene Shake has a cooking tv show called Coastal Cooking with Tene Shake. He was there and asked us how our food was. He was dressed awfully nice though, I don't think he prepared my clam chowder or my fish & chips. I guess that's what happens to chefs when they become successful.

Here is Chris at our table which overlooked the bay.

These noisy sea lions could be heard all through our lunch.

A picture of us using Chris' arm as a tri-pod.

Sometime mid afternoon, we arrived at our next hotel, The Dolce Hayes Mansion. Our room was ready, so we checked in and got settled.


The 2 main attractions we wanted to see in San Jose were the Winchester Mystery House and the Computer History Museum. Since it was already mid to late afternoon, we were afraid that we would be out of luck for the rest of the day, but lo and behold, the Winchester Mystery House was open late!


For those unfamiliar with the Winchester Mystery House, it was built by Sarah Winchester, daughter to the Winchester Gun fortune. She was a believer in ghosts & spirits and built the house because the spirits told her to do so. The house was under construction 7 days a week for 38 years. There are lots of quirky features to the house such as stairs that lead to nowhere and doors that open to nothing. There are 160 rooms in the house.
We took a tour of the house and the behind the scenes tour. The behind the scenes tour took us in the basement and other areas not on the regular tour. It was our lucky night, we were the only ones on both tours, so we had our own private tours.

Here's Chris waiting between tours.

And me

And a picture of both of us taken by our private tour guide.

A different view of the house.

The front door that was supposedly only used 3 times.

One more view

It was about 8 after we finished up at the Winchester Mystery house. We really didn't feel like going to another restaurant. So we stopped at a grocery and picked up some cheese, hummus, crackers, & fruit and ate back at the hotel while watching Get Him to the Greek on HBO.