I recently put together a fairly substantial road trip to see a bunch of California I'd never…read moreproperly explored, including a handful of stops, like this one, to see things that had gone on mental my list to see "eventually" like a decade ago, that I decided to cross off as many of as I could, at once. Honestly, I didn't entirely know what to expect - I'd seen pictures of the place, but pictures don't do the *scale* of the place justice. Indeed, having now taken the tour of what is left, the most mindboggling thing I learned about it is, by the time anyone had started working to preserve what was left, a majority of the land Forestiere had converted to his home, had long been sold to developers, who just filled it all back in. It was originally even several times larger!
Anyway, the part I did already know, but it was still impressive to see in person: from ground level, it hardly looks like anything, just a standard small orchard, if that. But as soon as you descend, you can see, and *feel*, instantly why he built it. Unlike the sprawling Winchester house I originally had mentally compared it to, which was built by a rich person slowly going insane, in this case, it was built by someone with fairly modest wealth (indeed, when he started, no wealth whatsoever), just loads of time and the willingness to learn how to construct and then, for the rest of his life, continuously improve, a wonderfully air conditioned house using no electricity (it was a hundred million degrees outside the weekend we were there, and a perfect temperature once the tour started), that everything he built, was built to make it a more comfortable place for himself to live and grow citrus, as he slowly McGuyvered himself a megamansion out of nothing but primitive tools, a couple donkeys, and decades worth of time and effort. Super cool! (Well, we did learn, eventually he realized what he was building could be turned into a hotel, and had started working on that when he died. It's too bad he didn't complete it - I'd have loved to stay in that hotel!)
It's even more impressive that, while it eventually turned into quite a home, he *started* digging it as a temporary fix to try to grow his citrus, after he moved to Fresno hoping to farm citrus, so when he discovered the topsoil sucked too much to grow citrus trees, he dug deeper down, planted citrus there, and built an underground citrus grove so successfully, with fruit of all shapes and sizes, that a majority are still the same citrus trees growing there now - and they look *seriously* juicy. I just wish they could sell them to us when they were ripe - I wanted to eat one! (I asked - they aren't legally allowed to sell produce to consumers themselves. Every once in a while some local business will buy produce and make snacks they can sell themselves, but mostly they just have to let the produce fall naturally and decompose back into the soil.)
I wouldn't feel the need to come back now that I've seen it - it's not like anything is likely to *change* at this point (unless maybe they eventually could get a license to sell the citrus grown there?) - but it was definitely worth making the detour to see the place finally.
p.s. Parking was not *nearly* as much of a big deal as I'd worried it would be. The website indicates that due to construction on the next big street over, it's street parking, so get there early. Turns out the street they said to park in, is basically a glorified alley - admittedly, we were the first tour of the day, it might get busier later, but there was *tons* of free parking. I was mostly worried about our car being broken into, being in what is now a fairly sketchy-looking neighborhood with zero foot traffic most of the time. It was fine, though, obviously.
