We did the first of the five tours offered, called the “experience” tour, which consisted of the bus ride a few miles up the hill from the visitor center to the castle grounds, a quick walk-through of some of the outdoor facilities and abridged visits to a couple of the buildings, and of course the bus ride back down to the visitor center. What was silly was that there was no single tour you could take to see everything (or almost everything), and moreover if you elected to spend the whole day there and do all five tours, you’d spend a large portion of the time in the areas where the tours overlap (e.g. the outdoors Neptune Pool), and an even larger portion of the time riding the bus up and down the hill.

Overall the experience felt a bit cheap and canned, not to mention rushed. The State Park people seemed to do everything they could to push as many busloads of tourists through the place as possible and milk as many dollars out of us as they could. What would William Randolph Hearst think; would the builder and collector frown at visitors hurried through his creation too fast to take a moment and truly appreciate what he’d built, or would the businessman approve of healthy revenue stream generated?

Granted, Hearst Castle is itself a product of the 20th century, much like, say, Disneyland, so maybe it’s not really fair to compare its tours to some I’ve taken of the ruins of ancient Rome or the Vatican, for example.

Still, I can’t help but be a bit cynical. Take the photo below, for example, of Janice and I in front of the beautiful Neptune Pool on the Hearst Castle grounds. Those with a keen eye will notice something seems not quite right about the lighting, and they’re right: the photo is a composite of a stock photo of the pool and a photo taken of Janice and I against a green screen just before we boarded the bus. It seems rather absurd, since minutes later we were at the Neptune Pool proper, and had we not been rushed along and crowded in with a few dozen other tourists, could have used our cameras to create the genuine article.

Of course, we bought the photo because we were rushed along and it was too crowded to get a clear photo. At least we can say that the photo was taken on the same day, and relatively close to, our actual visit to Hearst Castle… We joked about how they could take the same greenscreened photo of us, whip up Adobe Photoshop and drop us in front of the Eiffel tower, the pyramids at Giza, the ruins of Machu Picchu, etc. for a few extra dollars. At what point is the experience, or at least the artifacts thereof (souvenirs, photos, etc.) so synthetic that they become meaningless, if not worthless?