Friday, 21st December
Up at 6:30 and left at 7:15 arriving at the Winchester Mystery House at San Jose at 8:15. On the way we looked down on some very thick fog in the valley.
It was VERY cold and the house was not yet open so we went for a short walk through a shopping area and waited in the sun until they opened at 9:00 am. We went on a guided tour with four other people which took about 1 ¼ hours. The house was fascinating. It had been continually added to and altered over 30+ years and as a result became full of odd little rooms, corridors, doors and stairs to nowhere and idiosyncrasies. The eccentric owner had been the widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle. She continually added rooms to the house for the spirits of those killed by the rifles and she also had a séance room in the centre. There were certain sections which remained unfinished and others that were unrepaired from the 1906 earthquake.
We then walked around the gardens and grounds.
Left for Sonora at 12:00 pm, having lunch on the way. We drove through some towns which looked all new but with a lot of housing in the middle of bare hills. We saw snow on the mountains in the distance and as we entered Sonora at 3 pm there was a pile of snow which had fallen off a car in the middle of an intersection. We looked at our photos (Matthew had 3 x mine) and put them on memory sticks and I spent about an hour going through all the bags looking unsuccessfully for Christopher’s camera’s download cable. We went to Round Table Pizza for dinner.