Day 24: San Juan Bautista

Off we went to San Juan Bautista with Maria. This town is named after the Spanish mission of the same name as are many Californian towns with Spanish saints’ names (San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego etc). 200 years ago there was a road called El Camino Real (the King’s road) and there were missions established a day’s journey apart along it. It survives in bits and pieces many of which are along a major highway (101) with bells along the side indicating this.

We arrived in town near the mission and of course Disa fired up the GPSr immediately and headed to the nearest geocache. Unfortunately there was a rather enormous snake at Ground Zero, so we decided to give up the attempt at the cache until later. There were two women sitting at a bench on the other side of the fence from the snake, so Maria warned them of the snake, but they did not seem concerned.

We made for the mission (because we were interested in the history of it – not because we wanted to get away from the snake, really!). It was 200 year old, and to be honest looked 200 years old. There were several rooms under restoration, so perhaps they will be improved however there wasn’t much in the way of explanation. There were some rooms that were furnished and fitted out with items from the heyday of the mission; they had windows into them that you could look through, however there wasn’t much explanation and the rooms looked decidedly neglected. The gardens in the internal courtyard of the mission were quite lovely though, well maintained and lots of different flowers to look at. The church itself was very well maintained and very beautiful and is still used today as the local Catholic church. The floors were beautiful terracotta tiles, delightfully cool, that had animal footprints in them from being sun dried outside.

We had a lunch at an authentic Mexican restaurant that Maria knew of. Yummy! And to top things off, when we returned to the geocache we had attempted earlier, the enormous serpent was gone and we found the cache!