Winchester to Lincoln
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Day 2: November 4, 2018 Winchester to Lincoln Comment via blog |
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For breakfast, I picked
Denis' Country Kitchen from online recommendations and
was not disappointed. I felt guilty leaving a sizable portion of
this great meal uneaten but I just couldn't
stuff it all in.
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I headed west on expressways. I would return on the Lincoln Highway. I
wasn't following a narrow two-lane looking for historical land marks so I
was listening to music. It was a new Dirk Hamilton CD I'd purchased at
last night's show. It was a live recording from 2009 that had only
recently been released. I had no idea what songs were on it. Having driven
the Lincoln Highway through this area in the past, I knew it was the
setting for Dirk's Windmill Hills. Like magic, that's the song that
started playing at almost the first windmill came in view. When I told
Dirk about it later, he said that wasn't the first time he'd heard a story
like mine. The song opens with "On 580 headin' east...". I
wasn't sure what road I was actually on so I watched for the next sign.
Yep, I was on 580 headin' west.
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The target of my expressway drive was
Winchester
Mystery House. The word "sprawling" tries but doesn't
really do the house justice. In 1886 it was an eight room farmhouse. Over
the next thirty-six years the room count would grow twenty-fold to 160.
What happened to that little farmhouse? Sarah Winchester happened.
Sarah's husband was the son of the founder of Winchester Repeating Arms. He died at 43. Years earlier, their only child had died at less than six weeks. Reportedly, a psychic told Sarah that the ghosts of all the people killed by "The Gun that Won the West" had done in her daughter and husband. (Others said it was marasmus and tuberculosis.) The ghosts would almost certainly get her too unless she could keep them away. Apparently Sarah was told that the noise of saws and hammers would do that. With $1000 a day income, Sarah had the means to undertake a never-ending remodeling project. And she did. |
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Not all of that remodeling was particularly practical. There are numerous
doors and stairs that go nowhere. The first picture shows a stairway that
ends at the ceiling. The winding stairway in the second picture would seem
pretty weird if you didn't know that Sarah had severe rheumatoid arthritis
and could only lift her feet a couple of inches. She could manage the
switchback stairs. That's our tour guide through an internal window in the
third picture and Sarah's bed in the next.
The fifth picture is of Sarah's seance room which she used nightly. The room has three doorways. The one we used to enter is bidirectional. The other two are exits only. One, which we used, by virtue of having no handle on the other side, the other by virtue of an eight foot drop. The last picture shows an early 7-11: eleven steps on the near side, seven on the other. |
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I kicked of the Lincoln Highway portion of the trip by heading directly
to this landmark garage in Livermore, California. There are indeed two
ends to it but one isn't nearly as photogenic as the other.
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Although there always seems to be a white truck parked in front of the
Summit Garage, it does appear to be updated regularly. Check out
2013 and
2011.
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We stopped here for lunch in 2013 but today I just stopped in for a beer.
Note the Lincoln Highway sign beyond the
doorway.
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I grabbed a shot of the Big 'L' in Stockton as I approached, then pulled
into the parking lot for a better view.
I ended the day in Lodi... again. If I'd known this was where I would end up I would have just kept my room but I didn't. To introduce a little variety, I switched motels |
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