We are just pulling out of Chicago Union Station Tuesday evening on the Lake Shore Limited for arrival in New York tomorrow afternoon.

San Jose   Driving south from San Francisco toward Los Angeles we passed San Jose at the "bottom of the bay", or at the knuckle of your thumb.

We didn't stop. The thing we like there we've visited twice before, and it's the sort of thing you can keep on savoring. Once you've been there, you never forget it.

On our first visit to California in 1968 we stopped to visit the Winchester Mystery House (Photo by Gentgeen). It was then a not well-maintained Victorian mansion. All the shingles were weathered and gray. But Victorian mansions are a dime a dozen. That's no reason to go to San Jose.

Our second visit was two decades later. The outside of the building had been beautifully restored in all its deep Victorian colors, and a very complete Visitor's Center had been built next door.

So why see this Victorian Mansion as opposed to any one of dozens of others? There is no other one like this one. Anywhere.

It all has to do with the combination of human folly and money.

Sarah Winchester had inherited from her husband the Winchester rifle money. I can't resist the terrible pun to say that she was loaded, but she was.

She was also highly superstitious and listened to fortune tellers. And there we have the basis to produce something like the Winchester House.

She had bought a San Jose farmhouse. A fortune teller convinced her that she was doomed to be haunted by the ghosts of all the people killed by Winchester rifles, especially the many Indians, unless she could scare them away. And there were two ways to scare them away.

The first was noise. She was told to add on to that original farmhouse. As long as the spirits kept on hearing the sound of hammers and saws, they would be scared away. So, starting in 1884, she had workmen at the house 24 hours a day, pounding and sawing. The work went on until her death in 1922. The house ended up with about 160 rooms.

The compulsive construction was bad enough, but the second way to keep clear of the evil spirits was to fool them. This is where the merely eccentric moves into the bizarre. The rooms may or may not connect. A door may open to reveal a wall. A staircase may end at a solid ceiling. Another staircase may end high on a wall with no way to get through. Windows look into next rooms. It was at the Winchester House that I learned the concept of the low-riser staircase, where each step is maybe only two inches above the previous one. Taking such baby steps you get exhaused just going a short distance. I remember a low-riser self-contained staircase in the middle of a room, not near any wall or ceiling. You went up it, switched back a few times, and ended up coming down right next to where you had started. You come away from this building wondering what goes through people's heads. It's beyond the eccentric, and perhaps beyond the compulsive. But if you have the money ...

There is one other thing that you'll find unique to this building and not anywhere else, and I love it. Apperently she had been living in the original farmhouse core of the building when the 1906 earthquake struck. As you can imagine, she took the earthquake as a Particularly Bad Sign from the spirits. I don't know if the earthquake damage in the old part was the only damage, or just worse than in the rest of the building, but she immediately abandoned the original part of the building, as is, and had it boarded up, which is how it stayed until her death.

When you are taken into this part of the building, you at first find it unremarkable, compared to what you've been seeing, until you see the huge jagged cracks and fissures going up the living room wall. And then it strikes you. This must be the only place where something like this is still preserved. You are looking at the effects of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as though it had happened yesterday.

Big Sur   All of the Northern California coastline is spectacular, from the Fort Ross area, through Marin County and San Francisco and south. But the area between Carmel and San Simeon (Hearst's Castle) has gotten to be the most famous, and under the name of Big Sur.

On the Monterey peninsula, the town of Monterey was the governmental capital, but neighboring Carmel was set up as a religious center for the chain of missions being built. They called the area south of them El País Grande del Sur, the Big South Country. I suppose it's called Big to include the cliffs, sky, ocean, waves, views. It is spectacular country.

But to me the curiosity is the name. The Spanish and English names were oddly reduced and blended to one English word and one Spanish word, Big Sur.

Anyway, I like authenticity and know that the Spanish word for south, sur, is pronounced SOOR, so on our first trip to Big Sur I called it Big Soor. When we were showing our slides of the area to my mother-in-law, however, she became puzzled. "Since the area is so attractive, why to they call it the Big Sewer?" That's when I started pronouncing it like everyone else as an English word: Big Sir.

Cartoon   Many years ago I saw a New Yorker cartoon that's remained with me. It showed a roadside scene. A dotted line crossed the road and roadside. On the one side of the line was maybe a harpist with flowing hair playing and three dancing maidens doing a circular Greek classical dance in lacy gowns. On the other side of the line were a bunch of guys in Hawaiian shirts, fedoras and sunglasses, smoking stogies and punching index fingers into each other's shoulders. On the side someone was commenting: "Gee, I never thought the difference was that great between Northern and Southern California." I know it's not fair, but it's priceless. And there's always a tiny bit of truth in every joke. They're different worlds. It's a wonder they never became different states.

Wolfgang Puck   We wanted to visit two of Wolfgang Puck's restaurants in California. While in San Francisco we celebrated our anniversary at his Postrio. Then in Los Angeles we went to the Beverly Hills location of his Spago. At Spago I looked up and spotted him shaking hands at the next table. So, I waved him over and said a few lines in German to him, but we mostly chatted in English about the food. He is known for his California eclectic style of cooking, but I pointed out to him than we had gone out of our way to order the two tributes he'd put on the menu to Austria: I had ordered the Wiener Schnitzel and Bev had had the Gulasch mit Spätzle. So this summer we met two "foodies", Julia Child and Wolfgang Puck.

Going Way South   We ran down to San Diego, and I felt I had to cross the border. We had been to Mexico years ago, taking a three-week Spanish course in Mexico City and spending some three weeks more visisting all different corners of the country. But we had flown then and I had never physically crossed the famous/infamous border, and I wanted to have experienced it.

We zipped down the 16 miles from San Diego and dipped our toe in and out, so to speak. The crossings went fast, I drove around Tijuana, down the main drag of Avenida Revolución, and out. We were out of the country a half hour, which was more than I needed.

But the most interesting thing was when we got back. Picture the triangular yellow caution signs you see along the roadside. They most often show the silhouette of a running deer in the center, sometimes other animals.

On the interstate going north from the border I spotted three of the triangular yellow caution signs, but they didn't show animals. Each one had the silhouette of a running father, mother, and little girl racing into the US.

And halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles on the interstate, northbound lanes only, was a full-stop roadblock to check cars.

Metropolitan Areas   As metropolitan areas join cities together, different kinds of names result. Tampa Bay, Chicagoland, the Twin Cities, and the Bay Area (San Francisco) are some, others are more direct: Metropolitan New York. But this is about the recently developing name for Metropolitan Los Angeles: Southern California.

Hearing it, you might think of the lower half or third of the state, as in the cartoon above. But if that's what you mean, you have to say it a different way, because Metropolitan Los Angeles has now usurped the term.

Southern California has now come to mean Greater Ellay, and not any other of the inland desert communities that are equally far south, if not further, and I don't believe San Diego is included in the term by most people, even if it does lie due south of Ellay.

Of course, I can't leave the subject without mentioning the the exact same thing is being done in Florida. Metropolitan Miami, including Fort Lauderdale and up to Palm Beach, sometimes called the Gold Coast, has now taken over the term South Florida. On the west coast, Naples and Fort Meyers is as far south, but they're not included; nor are the Keys or Key West, which are certainly farther south. If the radio refers to the weather in South Florida, they are not talking about the Keys.

It's curious that this phenomenon has happened to two sunbelt cities, both in the southern part of their respective states, and also that one region has chosen "Southern" and the other "South".

New York   It's Wednesday morning and as soon as we pass Albany, we'll head down the beautiful Hudson Valley to complete our train trip from California to the New York island. The Woodie Guthrie verse is again appropriate:

Try it, with clapping.

Hindsight   As I add this paragraph well after the original text was written, I’ll point out again that the California Trilogy was written on the train from California to New York on September 3, 4, and 5, 2001. I find it poignant to see myself having written about our return to the “New York island” just six days before Nine Eleven.