Ethan’s first Intersession began this week. 3 weeks off in October! Woohoo! We planned a trip to experience the 4th grade mission curriculum live and in person. (Made more palatable to Ethan by capping it off with a trip to Disneyland with Zoe’s leftover Park Hopper passes – thanks Zoe!)

Grandma Penny and Grandpa Jim were ready to get Matthew and Jared to school and all activities while Ethan and I were traveling. It turned out they didn’t have to stay longer than one day when Glen was reprieved by Marketo early while he waits to start his new gig at Adchemy, so he had the whole week off!

What a way to see California!

We started at San Juan Bautista and worked our way south seeing 15 missions over 4 days (prudently skipping Carmel due to what was sure to be horrific traffic. We can hit it on a nice family overnight some other time.)

The missions are spaced at what was meant to be about a day’s ride apart along what was then Juan Bautista de Anza’s El Camino road and is now (mostly) 101. (Look for the bells marking it up and down California including in San Mateo. Amazingly he made his expedition in 1775-76 – the same year the east coast was trying to sign a Declaration of Independence!) Today that’s about a 50 minute drive on average between missions. What beautiful scenery – farmland, mountains, ocean, lakes, creeks, deer, quail, bunnies, hummingbirds, swallows.

Some missions are state parks, some are active parishes. Some are in pristine condition, re-built or preserved. Nuestra Senora de Soledad is mostly ruins surrounded by farmland. Capistrano is both a ruin, calling the remains from the church that collapsed in the 1812 earthquake the “Acropolis of America,” and the most beautifully preserved mission – truly the “Jewel of the Missions.” (Its chapel is the only church left standing that was graced by the presence of Blessed J Serra.)

The missions’ heyday lasted only about 50 years. The first mission, San Diego de Alcala, was founded in 1771 but they weren’t really up and functioning as the communes that the Franciscans envisioned until about 1780 (I think it was San Luis Rey de Francia that had 50,000 combined sheep and cattle!). The Spanish stopped funding them in the 1830’s and then secularized the land. Or maybe Mexico secularized the land after their revolution? It’s still unclear to me!

Why, you may ask, do we study the missions if they were such a short part of California’s history, when the American Indians displaced by them were here for thousands of years living in harmony with the land? Surprisingly, the missions are a fantastic jumping off place to study most of California’s history pre-gold rush 1849. Yes, the California Indians were here for thousands of years, but they weren’t exactly keeping a written history that we can read today. Every single mission, to their credit, had information about the Indians who lived on the mission land before the Franciscans and Spaniards came. Photographs, murals, artifacts including the hand-woven baskets (the best in the world – they could hold water and were used for everything including cooking), arrowheads, mortar and pestles and lots of information about way of life pre-mission like diet details.

Santa Barbara’s mission had an interesting essay entitled, “Free or Slave” about the legal status of the people who did all the work. The essay asserts that American Indians were granted the equivalent of the legal status of children in Spain at the time, and were therefore neither. Ethan thought that was hogwash since they never had the option of “growing up” under this system. Most of the information was not as patriarchal as the legacy of the missions. (i.e. the missions renamed the Indians based on the name of the saint the mission was named for, instead of calling tribes the names they’d given themselves. And most offensive to me were the statues of Junipero Serra with young Indian boys in truly questionable poses).

One of the missions, was it San Fernando Rey de Espana?, had a room dedicated to “14 Flags of California” which is a great story/curriculum about the legal status of California from the 1500’s to the date of statehood in 1850.

We weren’t the only ones with this great idea to tour missions. We ran into a dad and his son ETHAN, age 9 and in 4th grade, at San Buenaventura on Monday a.m. and then again at our next stop San Fernando Rey. They were doing the same thing! The Ethans enjoyed each other’s company and so did Vincent and I as we hit the rest of the missions. Too bad they postponed their Disneyland trip from Wednesday, although we wish them better weather than we had.

Anyway, this is a great way for families with kids age 7 and older to tour California. If you take your time and limit yourself to 2 or 3 per day you can also take time to enjoy so much of the magic California has to offer: hiking, beach excursions, Solvang’s Little Denmark and wine coutry, San Luis Obispo’s college community, Legoland, Disneyland, L.A….. the list is too long.

Ethan and I had a great time! And we learned a lot too!

Pictures coming soon!