It was really cool to finally see the house in person.
I remember it being called a “haunted” location on various Travel Channel shows I watched growing up. The house underwent an extensive expansion and renovation, and there are many theories as to why Sarah built the house to the size that she did.
Sarah was an heiress who inherited a great fortune when her husband, William Wirt Winchester died. The Winchester Mystery House started as an eight bedroom farmhouse in San Jose, California. The next day we went to the Winchester Mystery House. There are lots of other towns that you could stop by at this point in the trip, like Monterey and Santa Cruz. We spent about 4 hours here and went to San Jose after that, which was about a 90 minute drive. My husband and I are big fans of wine, so we spent most of our time wine tasting. By the time we got to Bixby Bridge towards the end, it wasn’t long after we regained steady cell service and got to Carmel.Ĭarmel is a cute little seaside town that has lots of shops and wineries. There were also many places along the way where we could pull over that looked pretty, so we stopped quite a bit. We put McKay Falls into our GPS for the point we wanted to end up in first, and from there we just kept driving along the PCH. This wasn’t really a problem for us, as we knew the main points where we wanted to stop on the map beforehand, and you can’t really get lost.
This is essentially a parking lot with a little walkway along the coast looking down on the beach.Ī huge heads up: you will not have cell service heading through Big Sur. You can’t actually go down to the beach, but you still get a great view of these animals from the viewing area. We started by going to an elephant seal viewing area in San Simeon before heading into Big Sur. It’s also very easy to add Hearst Castle onto this trip! Hearst Castle is right in San Simeon, and would be a great place to stop and take a tour of before heading up through Big Sur into more of northern California. We had some spots in mind that we wanted to see (McKay Falls and Bixby Bridge being our top two), but knew that we would stop whenever we saw a good viewing point or anything that caught our interest. We left at 5 am, and got up to this area around 10 am. You could absolutely drive over to Santa Monica and start the drive from there to do the entire thing up the coast, but to save us time, we took the 101 most of the way up until we hit the 1 in San Simeon. My husband and I did the drive up to San Simeon from the Burbank area. My husband and I decided that we would drive up through Big Sur, stop in Carmel, spend the night in San Jose, and end with the Winchester Mystery House before heading back to Los Angeles. Ever since I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with all things creepy and “haunted”, and the Winchester Mystery House always interested me. I had already been to San Francisco, so when it came to driving up the PCH from Los Angeles, I had a different end goal in mind. If you had about a week, I feel like doing the drive from LA to San Francisco would be doable if you wanted to see both cities. If you had two to three weeks and really wanted to see a good chunk of California, I would recommend starting in San Diego and driving all the way up to San Francisco. I feel like there are definitely many ways you could experience driving up the PCH. Driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, from San Simeon to San Jose, was one of the most incredible things I have ever done. I had a few things on my must-do list when moving out to the west coast: go to the Grand Canyon, San Francisco, and drive up the Pacific Coast Highway.
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