The next couple of blogs are about my return to Rancho Guajome during their Rancho Christmas event. What dictates what number I am on in this series is the video I am on. Since the video I had for this one would have been too big I decided to split it up into two parts. This means that this blog and the next one will be dedicated to video #36 which covers some of the insides of the rancho. The two blogs about some of the festivities at the adobe will be in #37.
During the last time I presented this adobe I dealt with what you can see on the outside. This time I want to show you just some of how the insides of what the adobe looks like. There are many rooms at this adobe. It would take too many pictures and video footage to show them all. So, I will just show a few rooms and let it go at that.
Rancho Guajome is a California Historical Landmark, and the following is the CHL marker for it. In the previous blogs on this place I mentioned how the Cout's family were the ones who built the adobe here. For our purposes this adobe has been the chief rival of Camulos as far as being thought of as the "Home of Ramona". There was some thought that Helen Hunt Jackson visited this place, that it was an influence on the novel, people came here as a tourist spot because of the novel, etc. No one really knows though. You can click the following picture, make it bigger, and read if you want to.
That up there is the sewing room that was added much later. It is fun to go up there since you get an overlook of the area.
What they do here is at the end of November they have a special family event called Rancho Christmas. The place is decorated for Christmas and they have a bunch of festivities here. When the weekend is done then the rancho is closed to guests for the next few months. In the above picture you can see the door entrance, and you can see the Christmas Tree below as you enter.
Continuing past the tree, taking a left, going down the corridor, then turning around will get you to the next picture. Most of the rooms are decorated in some way. This following picture location I have shown before. It is decorated, there are people down the way, and there was a man playing Christmas songs on a piano/organ behind me. There were lots of people moving back and forth through this way.
It only took me two takes to get the necessary video footage here which was pretty good considering the amount of people that had the potential to get in my way. When I went upstairs I had to delay moving where I wanted to because of the family up there. No big deal. So, I ended up cutting there, then I got footage that I decided to use at the beginning of the video. The following is a quick stich of two pictures just to give you an idea of what was going on outside at the time I was upstairs.
In the next blog I will show you some of the rooms they lived, slept, and did business in.
Ramona Epic #36: Rancho Christmas (Youtube Version)
Another room to sleep in.
This is the school room the kids would have been taught. The teachers desk is by the chalkboard, Christmas stockings over the fireplace, and a students desk. BTW, one of the math problems on one of those chalkboards was wrong. lol!
One of the living rooms.
This is where the paperwork and business was done.
I am going to stop here with the rooms because it would take me another week or two to present every room in the adobe, and I do not feel the need to do that. The video does cover some of the other parts of the adobe like the dining room, the rooms food was prepared, etc. In #37 I will show some of the festivities they have during this event.
