A chance to swim in the Neptune Pool

The bidding is now open on the Ultimate California Getaway: An overnight stay at the Hearst Castle at San Simeon. “No one has spent the night at the Castle and privately experienced the grounds in more than fifty years,” says Carol Schrieber, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Hearst Castle, which is hosting the eBay auction. The listing includes these details about the prize package:

You and your friends will experience a private museum director’s behind-the-scenes tour, a relaxing swim in the Neptune pool, mellowing martinis and hors d’oeuvres in W.R.’s own wine cellar, an extravagant multi-course gourmet feast, paired to perfection with premium Central Coast wines served on the Neptune Terrace, a full-length movie in Hearst’s private theatre, after dinner cigars and brandy overlooking the breathtaking Pacific Ocean and so much more. You and your partner will then spend the night in the Castle’s south wing with a terrace view of the Pacific coastline glistening under a canopy of stars.

As of today, the bidding was at $10,000. Friends of Hearst Castle plans to use the money to restore art and artifacts throughout the 165-room museum estate, which the Hearst Corporation donated to the people of California in 1957, six years after William Randolph Hearst’s death. Bidding runs until Sept. 27.

On the road: a new collection to take along

Verlyn Klinkenborg, author and New York Times editorial writer, digs into the American Earth anthology at Book Forum. From Henry David Thoreau, writing from Concord in 1837, to book editor Bill McKibben, writing from the Yosemite backcountry last year, American Earth is a collection of essays, speeches, and poems about nature and the environment. More than a hundred writers contributed. Klinkenborg enthuses:

This is an anthology, then, of the writing that gets produced when reasonable men and women fight off the extremes of protest and despair to which they’ve been driven by the devastation of this planet. That makes this a practical-minded collection, commendably light on the vaporous spirituality, the blank stare, found in so much nature writing. This is literature for a cause, a cookbook for getting something done, a partial archive of the documents that shaped ecological awareness as we know it.

Keep reading here.

[via Jacket Copy]