During late ’02 and most of ’03 we set ourselves the project of visiting all of the 21 Alta California missions. We were centrally located just about halfway between San Diego, the first and southernmost, and Sonoma, the last and northernmost of them. We’re not religious, but I’ve always enjoyed churches architecturally and as places of contemplation. And we’re history buffs, we like to visit anything that’s old ... and in California the missions are about as old as it gets, except for Indian artifacts.

They were established beginning in 1769 by Junipero Serra, and then by Fermin Lasuen. Their purpose was to civilize and bring Christ to the Indians. What they really brought was slavery and disease, but hey, at least their souls were saved. They were intended to be one day’s horseback ride from each other, and they are spaced just about right for that. During the 1830s Mexico, which owned California before the Americans stole it from them, "secularized" them, trying to lessen the influence of the Catholic Church. After America took California they were returned to the Church. By around 1900 most of them were in ruins to one degree or another. During this century there has been much restoration. Some are now gleaming, functioning churches. Some are State Parks. Some are not much of anything.

What follows is not meant to be a history lesson. There could even be some stuff in here that is wrong. No, this is simply my own idiosyncratic impressions of our visits, colored by many things, including how I felt on that day. If you want to learn more, follow the links that Lee has provided. They are listed more or less in the order we visited them, in the course of half a dozen major trips and many shorter ones.

1). SAN MIGUEL ARCANGEL. Seven miles from our front door, the 16th mission to be built and the first we visited. A good place to start, as it is on the edge of a small, impoverished town and hasn't been commercialized much. Unlike many, the original church building survived, with the original frescos on the walls. The roof has leaked a LOT over two centuries, and the place is dank and gloomy inside, dry and dusty outside, with astonishing growths of cactus. Oddly, San Miguel was one of the most prosperous missions when it was in business. You wouldn't know to look at it now.

It is estimated that $50 million dollars are needed to preserve and earthquake-proof the California missions, and about $10 million of that is needed just for poor little out-of-the-way San Miguel. Any kind of good shake would bring it right down, no question of that. It’s one of our favorites, both because it was our first and because it is MILES more authentic than most of them. I hope someone does something soon, but with the Cahleefornia budget crisis and the federal deficit I wonder if it’s going to happen.

(Later: The earthquake hit a few days before Xmas, 2003. We felt it 45 miles away in Oceano, big time! A few weeks later we went back to San Miguel and were horrified to see the big new cracks in it. It’s still standing, but the church is unsafe and closed down. It’s going to take a lot more than anticipated to fix it up, but our Cahleefornia senators and others are at work on it, and maybe some money can be found.)

2) SAN LUIS OBISPO DE TOLOSA. (Bishop of Toulouse) Thirty miles south of us. Basically nothing is left but the church, and that is a replica. This was the first mission to use the familiar red clay roof tiles ... because the Indians kept burning it down when it had a thatched roof. Pretty much destroyed by earthquakes more than once. It’s a working church, extremely clean and neat, and the surroundings are nice, in the middle of small-town San Luis Obispo. But all in all not a very interesting link in the chain.

3) LA PURISIMA CONCEPCION. Near Lompoc, another very prosperous mission, after they moved from the original site, flattened by the Quake of 1812, which seems to have hit at least a dozen missions very hard indeed. Fell into ruins, and then FDR and the CCC came along. They rebuilt it using only original methods and materials, even the three-mile aqueduct that was key to the success of the place. Now it looks pretty much as it must have in 1820 or so, complete with poultry, cattle, and swine, and a restored garden growing more varieties of herbs and edible fruits and leaves than I even knew existed. This is one of the jewels in the crown of the missions.

SECOND VISIT TO LA PURISIMA. Our favorite mission has "Mission Days" twice a month beginning in March. Local volunteers called "Prelada de la Tesoros" (Keepers of the Treasures), trained in mission lore, dress in period costume and we all pretend it is 1822. We were greeted in the church by the padre, who inquired whether we were coming up from Santa Inez or down from San Luis. Next we encountered one of the six soldiers of the garrison. He showed us how he makes the .75 caliber lead shot to go in his Brown Bess rifle. He said that with a flintlock like that, if it’s raining you’re better off with a bow and arrow or a lance, his weapon of choice. But if he hits something with that ball, it will go down.

The enactors were pretty good about staying in character, but when we got to the smithy there were three guys, one working the bellows, one looking on, and Juan, the blacksmith. He was making a knife from a flat iron bar. Somebody asked him where he got the metal stock:

Juan made us a nail from an iron rod. He worked fairly quickly, but it took maybe five minutes. Really drove home just how tough even the most ordinary tasks could be in 1822. How many homes do you think would be built in this country every year if they had to make every nail by hand?

We met an old ship’s captain from Boston, who had "actually" brought Juan’s raw iron around the Horn. He was dozing on the arcade, and somebody told us he’d been drinking entirely too much of the local rum. Probably needed the fortification for that long, terrible voyage home. We were also warned there were six mountain men of "questionable moral character" hanging around, and we saw one of them, but he seemed harmless. We had a great time at Mission Days.

4) SANTA INES. Somewhat overshadowed by the Scandi-disney-navian "Danish" town of Solvang a mile to the west. Lovely location, and what is there now is nicely presented, still functioning as a church ... and largely reconstructed, as the 1812 temblor leveled it, and an Indian revolt in 1824 did it again. Tsk-tsk, those pesky Indians! Didn't they know they were being given the gift of God's grace? ... They were not SLAVES, of course, though they could not actually leave once they were pressed into service building and harvesting, and were almost exterminated by white man's diseases ...

5) SAN ANTONIO DE PADUA. Off the beaten path. Actually, located on the grounds of Fort Hunter Liggett. We almost missed it (hint: when looking for a mission, if you see a "Mission Street," turn THERE ...), driving past many square miles of obstacle courses and what I finally figured out was a tank training ground, like the world's biggest, coolest sandbox, with full-sized toys. We had to drive through a maze of post 9/11 concrete truck-bomb retarders ... right, I'm sure Hunter Liggett is real high on Osama's hit list ... and a sentry who wrote down every detail from my drivers license. Finally, the mission ... which, due to its isolation, wasn't looted much during the days of forced Mexican secularization, from 1834 to the 1840's, when the government stripped the church of most of its possessions. Secularization often finished what quakes and Indians hadn't been able to destroy. San Antonio is well preserved, a good one to visit. And as one of the most isolated, you get a nice idea of what it must have been like when this was the only building for 50 miles. You’re unlikely to have to fight crowds; the first time we visited we were the only visitors. On our way out, we saw a coyote crossing the road on the army base.

6) SANTA BARBARA. This one and Carmel show what being located in a very rich community can do for you. (Rich now, anyway, though both had their problems in the early days, and bad quakes in 1812, 1925, and 1952 destroyed Santa Barbara over and over.) It was the last to be secularized, in 1846, and by then the USA had almost completed their outright theft of Spanish California, so the church got it back with very little damage done when American California returned confiscated property. SB is called the Queen of the Missions, and it's easy to see why. Everything is spanking clean with fresh paint. The church is very ornate, the gardens are immaculate, swept by Franciscan novitiates every day. (I guess.)

7) NUESTRA SENORA DE SOLEDAD. (Our Lady of Solitude.) I think of this as the hard luck mission. Things never did go right here. It was repeatedly destroyed by floods, of all things. Most of the Indian slaves died from plagues. By 1859 there was nothing left but ruined walls, some of which can still be seen. Fifty years of restoration efforts have produced only the small chapel, featuring a dolorous statue of Mary dressed in black, and a small residence wing. No big grand church building, no grounds to speak of. I almost felt sorry for the woman who ran the forlorn little gift shop. Right next door lines and lines of laborers were boxing a huge field of romaine lettuce at astonishing speed. It sure looked like hard work. Several dozen black and red chickens scratched out a living under some stunted orange trees. Depressing.

8) SAN JUAN BAUTISTA. (John the Baptist) Another great one. We have visited it twice. The town itself is pretty nice, much of it quite old (for California), and preserving what they claim is the only authentic Spanish plaza in California. This is one of two missions made famous by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo. If you watch the movie and then visit it today, you will see almost no changes in the buildings surrounding the plaza, with one startling exception. The screenwriter had Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak driving down to San Juan, then climbing up into the tall bell tower. Trouble was, when they got there ... no bell tower. I don’t think there ever was one. So they used an extremely fakey-looking glass shot looking down from a crane suspended over the mission roof, and created the rest of it in the studio.

Around the plaza are three or four buildings unchanged since the 1800s, now turned into museums. There is a great livery stable with a fine collection of horse-drawn wagons. There is a hotel, and the mansion of the richest man in town. All worth seeing. The hotel had what may be the world’s tallest outhouse, reached by a catwalk from the second floor. Bombs away!

The mission itself is on the San Andreas Fault. I mean, right ON it. You can stand in the graveyard and look out over a 20-foot cliff ... and that cliff marks the faultline. Naturally it has been damaged repeatedly by quakes. Some retrofitting has been done, but there’s more work needed to protect it, like at San Miguel.

The church is one of the largest, with four aisles, very nice frescoes and paintings. A working church, with a convent and a school attached. Possibly the best garden we've yet seen, of the lush, crowded variety, not the pruned and well-behaved kind like Santa Barbara. The attached museum is one of the best, too. Don't miss this one.

8.5) SAN JUAN BAUTISTA DE SUD. (John the Southern Baptist) An offshoot cult of the Franciscans who founded the other missions. Priests in their trademark vestments, called "juego del poliester" conducted services in the Templo del Pelo Grande (Temple of the Big Hair) and venerated Santa Tammy Faye ... okay, I made it up, but wouldn't it be fun?

9) SANTA CRUZ. As the park ranger in the tiny gift shop pointed out, building something in Santa Cruz out of adobe was not the brightest idea the Franciscans ever had. It rains a lot in Santa Cruz, and adobe is mud, straw, and cowshit. It melts. It seems it melted a LOT in the early days. Then a place called the Branciforte Pueblo was built right across the river. It specialized in gambling and smuggling, which the resident Indians found a lot more interesting than praying and making churches out of cowshit. In 1818 the Dread Pirate Bouchard threatened to invade. The Brancifortians volunteered to help protect the mission ... and looted it to the bare walls. (Serves the Franciscans right, trusting a bunch of lowlife gamblers.) Anyway, all that's left today is a row of "neophyte" (Indian) housing, about seven rooms of it. There is a half-scale replica of the old church. That's it. Very disappointing.

10) SAN CARLOS BORROMEO DE CARMELO. Second mission to be established. I don't like Carmel (actually Carmel-by-the-Sea, lah-ti-dah). What is there for me to like? I mean, plenty of cities have 17-mile scenic drives (or 36-mile, or 49-mile), but Crapola-by-the-Sea is the only place I know of that CHARGES you to drive on it! And what do you get for your 8 or 9 dollars? Why, you get to drive by a lot of golf courses, of which Carmel has seventy or eighty. (Well, almost.) I view golf courses as a blight upon the land, a staggering waste of space and fertilizer. So stick THAT up your Pebble Beach, Carmel. However, the Carmel Mission was our best experience so far. It is at least as fancy and well-maintained as Santa Barbara. Everywhere you turn there is a new treasure to explore, far too many things for me to describe here. But when we arrived there was a wedding in progress in the church. We couldn't go in during the service, so we peered around the corner with the other tourists. And when the padre pronounced them man and wife ... the place simply exploded with sound! Placed at the back of the church where I couldn't see it was a MASSIVE pipe organ, and this friar was playing it with real verve, something by Handel, I think. He was accompanied by a man playing a piccolo trumpet. The piccolo trumpet is a magical instrument, and absolutely perfectly suited to that venue. It plays only the high, brilliant, sparkling notes of a trumpet's upper register, the ones you usually have to struggle to reach, and it plays them effortlessly. They segued into the "Ode to Joy" as the couple and about a dozen bridesmaids hurried out into the courtyard, and I hurried in to catch every last note of the music. The organ really thundered! And while this was going on some unseen friar was whaling the hell out of all the bells in the tower. I get goose bumps just remembering it.

Just before we left we discovered the grave of Junipero Serra himself, laid to rest in the floor before the golden altar. What a day!

11) MISSION SAN FERNANDO, REY DE ESPANA. This one is located in a totally undistinguished neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley not far off the I-5 freeway … though I guess "totally undistinguished" pretty much sums up the whole valley, doesn’t it? Odd to think that this out-of-the-way building used to be the center of the whole region. Inside, everything was immaculate, freshly plastered and painted. We have learned that usually means it was recently "renovated," which often means the place was nothing but a few crumbling adobe walls before 1930 or so. And sure enough, this one was hit not just once, in 1812 when most of the missions south of Soledad were pretty much destroyed (and what a shake that must have been!), but again, in 1971, the Sylmar quake, which wasn’t a Big One but did plenty of damage if you were only a few miles from the epicenter, which Mission San Fernando was. There were a lot of photos of the damage in the museum, and it was heartbreaking. But there was money to restore it, and retro-fit so maybe the next one won’t be so cruel.

The museum was organized much better than most, the buildings were clean, the grounds and central garden primped carefully. San Fernando is one of the richer missions; being located in the giant LA metroplex doesn’t hurt when you need to raise money. We couldn’t get a real good look at the church itself because … there was a funeral going on. The mission grounds is backed up by a very big cemetery; you could easily roll the stiff right out the side door and straight to the hole in the ground if you wanted to save on hearse rental. I’ll bet they do a pretty good business in funerals. All in all, quite a nice mission, but not one with anything that made it particularly stand out in our minds.

12) MISSION SAN GABRIEL, ARCANGEL. San Gabriel is one of those towns you drive through on your way to or from Las Vegas, completely anonymous from the freeway. But most of these places were at one point, before being swallowed by LA, little towns, with a commercial area and dirt streets and everything. Streetcars ran through the orange groves that grew between them. The town of San Gabriel has integrated the mission into a charming little park/civic center, sidewalks inlaid with tiles made by school children. Some of them are very nice.

Lee fell in love with this one as soon as we paid our $3 and left the gift shop, because just beyond it was a combination of two of her favorite things: A garden, and a graveyard. We spent a lot of time there. My chief memory: 100-year-old, MASSIVE grape vines clinging to overhead arbors. A lot of San Gabriel is original walls, doors, rooms, and it hasn’t been restored to look brand new, which we both like. We have given this one the Best Graveyard award until a better one comes along. (San Juan Bautista retains the title of Best Garden.)

13) MISSION BASILICA SAN DIEGO DE ALCALA. We made good time through the desert and mountains east of San Diego, arrived at the mission in the afternoon. Traffic seemed heavy, and blimps were circling overhead. We had noticed signs for a stadium (Qualcomm?) at the same freeway exit, and I figured there was a bowl game going on. (I was right, I think it was the Fiesta Bowl.)

Frankly, there was not much about it to really set it apart from half a dozen other missions. Though I can honestly say that we’ve had a good and interesting visit at every mission we’ve been to, some are a lot more interesting than others. That, or something happens to make our experience unique, like the wedding and music at Carmel (which would have been a special one even without the ceremony). San Diego is beautiful and well-maintained, and would be a fine place to start an exploration of the mission chain, being the first, and all … but I don’t have a lot more to say about it.

Leaving, we encountered a HUGE traffic jam … going the other way, toward the Big Game, where we just came from. We realized we had dodged a bullet, and headed up the coast toward Oceanside.

14) MISSION SAN LUIS, REY DE FRANCIA. King of the Missions. We drove by this one at night, after checking into a little motel in Oceanside. They had strung bright Christmas lights all along the edges of the church, bell tower, and quadrangle. It was pretty enough … but since EVERYTHING in that part of California tries for that "mission" look, what they had done was to make the mission look exactly like an office building, or strip mall. Not a great beginning.

Back the next morning … For some reason the gift shop opened earlier than the museum, and thus the rest of the buildings. But there were extensive grounds outside the part you paid to see, including a huge area planted in cactus, with the brick remains of lavanderias, where the Indians did the laundry, and best of all, an extensive cemetery. One third of the boneyard seemed to have only people who died before 1940 or so, and the rest was clearly more modern, as everyone there was recently deceased—or sometimes not dead at all, just a name on a stone and a birthdate. I find that to be a very creepy practice. I don’t ever want to see my name on a tombstone. In fact, I don’t even WANT a tombstone. In fact, I’d rather not die at ALL.

So we whiled away the time until opening by browsing the stories written on the rocks. It’s always fascinating. One stone had an outline of what I think was an F-102, and the guy was the founder of "Delta Wing for Supersonic Flight." But the stunner was this one:

I realized this was less than two weeks before the armistice, 11/11/18. So this guy wasn’t the last doughboy to have his life wasted in maybe the most pointless and bloody war ever fought, but he was close. I wondered if he died in combat, or from the flu. Did you know more American soldiers died of the flu pandemic than from enemy action?

Finally inside, we thought this was quite a beautiful mission. The museum was well organized and interesting. The grounds were spotless, and the church itself was spectacular. San Luis Rey was spared the more dramatic forms of destruction, and survived relatively intact right through secularization, when it was supposed to be given over to the Indians. I’ll bet it will surprise no one that the administrators in charge of this managed to keep it all to themselves, while the Indians, the Luisenos, got diddly-squat. The US Army ran it for a while, and such famous men as Stephen Kearny and Kit Carson were stationed there. Finally it was deeded back to the church in 1865 by Abe Lincoln; the signed document is on display. What the church got back was a pretty decrepit but basically intact structure. Restoration has been in progress since 1892, and they still have a ways to go.

15) SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO. What can you say about Capistrano? Lots of things, not all of them good. It’s the only mission we’ve been to that has TWO shrines. One is called Serra’s Church, and is really an oversized chapel that was built when the Great Stone Church came crashing down. The other is to Rene Leon. Rene … who? Why, the dude who wrote that silly little song about the swallows. You know, the swallows that return on the same day every year … only now there’s just a handful of them, but every TV station in the Southland feels it must send the dumbest cub reporter on the staff down there as punishment. (You want swallows? I’ll give you swallows. Go to Sauvie Island north of Portland in the spring. I don’t know what the arrival date is, but I know that one day there’s no swallows, and the next day they are all over the place. They build their nests under the eaves of all the buildings, and if you stand too close they will make a strafing run at you, and at cats, too. And you can watch Mommy or Daddy Swallow swoop up to the nest and hover, while three or four little heads pop up. The chicks’ mouths are actually larger than their heads. I don’t know how they do that, but they do.)

The shrine to Rene Leon contains his desk and his piano and lots of memorabilia, and it is certainly appropriate to have it there, because without it Capistrano would be just another mission … no, it would be LESS than most of them, because it has no big original church. With the song (which I don’t think I’ve ever heard except when Bugs Bunny would sing it in the bathtub---which was actually a kettle Elmer Fudd was using to make a wabbit stew) … WITH the song, Capistrano is a genuine tourist attraction. Everything in the neighborhood is named Mission This or Swallow That. It’s hard to find a place to park. There was an actual line to get in, and the price was $6, by far the most we’ve paid. (The next one, Buenaventura, charged only $1, most of the others are $2 or $3.) They publish their own newspaper. Just bi-monthly, but still …

There were probably more people there than we’ve seen in all the other missions we’ve visited put together. There have been times when we were the ONLY visitors to a mission. Capistrano is definitely NOT my type of mission experience …

… And yet, I’ll admit there’s a lot to see. Nothing you couldn’t see with less crowding at other missions, but if you planned to see just one, this would be a good one.

Unique to Capistrano is the ruins of the church. It was made from stone, the only one of the missions like that, and was reportedly the wonder of California until a big quake brought down all but the back wall and portions of the sides. It was never replaced. Instead, a smaller hall was built, Serra’s Church, which is the oldest building in California, and furnished with a glorious golden altar from Spain. The ruins of the old church are now covered with scaffolds as engineers try to preserve them, since another big shake could bring down even the little bit that’s left. I don’t think there are any plans to rebuild it, just preserve the remainder. And of course, since it’s Capistrano, American Express just donated $150,000 to the project. If they gave it to a mission that really NEEDS it, like Soledad, nobody would ever hear about it.

16) SAN BUENAVENTURA. Located in the town that used to be called Buenaventura but now goes by simply Ventura. On our first attempt to visit we got there at 9 AM, and found the museum and grounds didn’t open until 10. We had already had breakfast and didn’t fancy waiting around, so we headed off east through country I’d never seen before: Highway 126 north of the Simi Valley, through Santa Paula, Fillmore, and Valencia, to Mission San Fernando.

On the way back home, due to horrific traffic through LA, we almost missed seeing this one AGAIN, this time by being too late. We got there at four-fifteen. But I had noticed the mission and grounds seemed quite small, so we paid our $2 and went into the one-room museum. The only thing of note was a very old wooden bell. The bells of Buenaventura were made of wood, it seems, the only mission that had them. Not exactly something to brag about, I figure, and there wasn’t much else. Like San Luis Obispo, this one has been crowded out by the town. The gift shop isn’t even part of the mission, as it has been in all the others; it was in a storefront on main street.

The grounds consist of a small garden and the church itself. In the garden was a tree that we were told was an "Angels Trumpet." I’ve seen plenty of flowers shaped like trumpets, but these were as big as actual trumpets. No kidding! They hung all over the tree, bell down. A hummingbird could have flown in and rattled around for days before finding his way out.

In the church there was an Hispanic family waiting their turns at the confessionals, both of which had lights indicating there was a bi-lingual padre inside ready to listen. I’ve always wanted to hang a sign outside one of these: EXPRESS BOOTH, 10 SINS OR LESS. (I stole this idea from John Callahan, the quadriplegic cartoonist.)

It occurred to us that we’d seen a wedding, a funeral, and confession in missions thus far. I wondered what our chances were of seeing all seven sacraments. (Once I start collecting things, be it books or missions or sacraments, I’m never content until I have the whole set.) Back home I learned something that I’d actually known already but forgotten: a funeral is not a sacrament. So what was left? Communion would be easy, just attend a mass, which is celebrated regularly in almost all the missions. I thought there was a fair chance of catching a baptism. As for the others … Anointing the Sick (formerly known as Last Rites, or Extreme Unction) … possibly I could fake a heart attack during a combined Confirmation/Ordination service …? Naaaah.

17) MISSION SANTA CLARA DE ASIS. This gets confusing. Mission Santa Clara is in San Jose, and Mission San Jose is in Fremont. I’m not sure why. We went to this one on our way back from trip to the Santa Cruz area, jogging north to San Jose to see it and the Winchester Mystery House. The mission is on the grounds of Santa Clara College and you can’t drive to it because of campus parking restrictions, and can’t see it from any road you can drive on without a parking sticker, so it was a little tough to locate. Finally we parked and walked onto the campus and asked a student. Turns out it was only a block away.

It’s a lovely mission … with about as little authentic about it as any in the chain. The current building is no less than the SIXTH to carry the title, and it’s not even in the original location. The story behind that is long and complicated and we wouldn’t even have known it if not for Huell Howser, the California Tour Guide on PBS. There is much to admire here, but not much that really set it apart, gave it its own character, aside from the unusual location, except for the largest, finest wisteria arbor I have ever seen. It was in prime blossom, absolutely delirious with purple flowers, and when we walked under it the gentle breeze that day showered us with petals.

One annoyance … this is the only mission of the 21 that has no gift shop, probably because of the campus location. We have been collecting cheap refrigerator magnets as souvenirs of our travels, and have been diligent about getting one from each mission. Not Santa Clara, though. We visited the college bookstore, no dice there, either. Mostly we buy little tiles, two inches square, with paintings of the missions on them, and we’ve paid from $2 to $5 for them, but more expensive ones are available, a set of tiny ceramic models of the buildings that are very nice, at $10 a pop. Do the math, that’s $210 if we got one at each mission, plus tax, a little steep for us. But if we simply CANNOT find the tiles, we have bought a few of the $10 ones. We had to pick up a $10 Santa Clara magnet at the next mission down the road.

18) MISSION SAN JOSE. Located right on the main highway through the old part of Fremont, in the East Bay. We hit this one the morning before my book signing in Berkeley. It is another reconstruction, but an exceptionally good one. At some point near the turn of the century the original mission was torn down and replaced by a New England Presbyterian-type church, complete with steeple. Much later that church was moved to a new location, and good riddance, I say. There is a good exhibit in the museum, showing the pains they took in reconstructing the old mission exactly as it had been before the traditionalist minister ruined it. They did a great job. Beside the building was a very good graveyard; Lee was in heaven, taking pictures of most of the tombstones.

19) MISSION SAN FRANCISCO DE SOLANO. The mission is in a state park in Santa Rosa that also includes the barracks used by the early garrison of the town. Across from that is the town square with an old Carnegie Library converted to the town museum and visitors bureau. There is also a monument commemorating the establishment of the Bear Flag Republic, which seems to have lasted about 16 days or so before the revolutionaries handed everything over to the Americans, including Spanish land grants stretching back many generation. The whole thing sounds fishy to me, like it was a setup to get all those greasers off all that valuable property and turn it over to white people. Which is exactly what happened.

20) MISSION SAN RAFAEL ARCANGEL. This is another reconstruction, and is really just a chapel. It is just north of downtown San Rafael, two blocks from the street George Lucas used for all the cruising cars in American Graffiti. It sits off to the side of a much larger church, which was not open when we visited. One of the less interesting, all in all.

21) MISSION SAN FRANCISCO DE ASIS. A good place to end our explorations. It is also known as Mission Delores, because of its location on Delores Street. I lived in San Francisco for about five years and must have driven by this place a hundred times and never even glanced at it. It is easy to miss unless you’re looking for it, because it sits beside a newer church so big I’d almost call it a cathedral. But if you stand across the street and look at them side by side, it is the mission that catches my eye with its simple but powerful lines, and its columns. There have been several churches on the corner, but only one mission, which survived the quakes of 1812 and 1906 with very little damage while its gaudier neighbors were destroyed. It came through the World Series quake, too. That thought made me happy, for some reason, that humble little building with walls of adobe six feet thick, erected by Indians and designed by amateur architects.

The big church is odd from the outside, with two huge towers that, for some reason, are seriously mismatched, looking not at all like each other. Possibly one shook down in a quake, but then why not replicate it when rebuilding? I never found out the reason, but it is quite a lopsided structure, and not in a way that pleased me. Inside was another story. It is a vast, vaulting interior with huge and beautiful stained glass high up, and it was draped in great swooping swathes of purple fabric for Lent. The prize, however, was a series of smaller stained glass windows down at the people level, depicting all the California Missions, and Junipero Serra, whose statues we had become very familiar with, as each mission seems to have one. Lee took a picture of each window, but we haven’t developed them yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Mission San Francisco was among the better-patronized ones, there were a fair number of people when we were there. Like Capistrano, it has a claim to fame that came long after it was built. With Capistrano it is that silly little song. With Mission Delores it was Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed Kim Novak wandering the graveyard and Jimmy Stewart following her in "Vertigo." (Did you know there are only two graveyards in the entire city of SF? There’s this one, and the military cemetery in the old Presidio. Frisco has always buried its dead in the town of Colma, some miles to the south, with a population of 100s of thousands of stiffs and about 40 living people.)

NUESTRA SENORA DE LOS BANOS SANITARIOS. Probably the most obscure of all the missions, but we swore to visit them all … Toward the end of his life, Father Junipero Serra became victim to many of the infirmities of old age, among them an irregular bowel and prostate troubles. The missions were planned to be separated by one day’s ride on horseback, but the Father could no longer make it that far without answering a call of nature. So these intermediate missions were established halfway between the regular missions. There were several, of which only one survives. The site is not well advertised; in fact, you have to know someone, but we’ve made contacts in our travels and were able to locate it. We’re pledged not to reveal its location. It’s quite a small adobe structure, "Our Lady of the Clean Restrooms," just two rooms side by side, so it can also be used as a confessional. The door has a crescent moon on it, symbolizing God’s Grace in Indian myth, and inside ancient copies of "El Catalogo de Sears y Roebuck" are nailed to the wall and, of course, there is the throne with a hole it in … a thoroughly unpleasant place, even after all these years. Avoid it on your mission tour.

So now we have 21 mission refrigerator magnets clinging to the exhaust hood over the stove, since the door of the fridge in the RV seems to be made of plastic.