Happy Veteran’s Day!
Today felt like a very long day, and yet looking back
through the ride and the sightseeing, we actually didn’t do that much!
We started off riding from Pismo Beach, but the route veered
inland almost right away, so we didn’t see much of the beach or dunes except at
a distance. Most of the ride was through
agricultural land, past fields of broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, and
strawberries. I could smell the berries
ripening in the fields, and the cauliflower as it was being harvested.
We stopped for strawberries from a roadside stand. There is nothing like buying field ripened
farm-direct strawberries. Nothing you
can get at the store, organic or otherwise, comes close to the perfection of
what you get at a roadside farm stand.
We bought two pounds, and quickly ate quite a few. The rest are in the car with me as I write,
filling the air with their heavenly fragrance and making me drool.
After tackling some killer hills (good thing we picked up
strawberries to refuel on!) we stopped in Lompoc for lunch. It was a bit of a challenge to find anything
open for the holiday. We went to the
Lompoc Restaurant, which didn’t look promising from the outside, but actually
was pretty nice inside, and the food was good too.
Thence to the mission: Mission La Purisima is located at the
edge of town, and still retains quite a few acres as part of the historic
park. It is the only mission that still
keeps livestock (of course, now it’s for atmosphere instead of for real
ranching). They have several sheep, a goat, a steer, a horse, three donkeys, a
turkey, and two pigs… not even a fraction of what the mission’s herds were like
when it was founded, but it is nice to help give a feel for what it looked like
then.
The strangest part of the current mission park is the new
visitor center and museum. The other missions
have the museum either in the mission adobes or in a new building made to look
like a mission adobe. This mission,
however, has a very large and very out-of-place modern looking wood-and-glass
structure at the entrance to the park.
It is the first thing you see, although fortunately they placed it so
that you cannot see it from the actual historic area. Also, strangely, the mission gift shop is not
in the visitor center/museum, but instead is in the actual mission buildings
(like the museum used to be a decade ago before this current visitor center was
built). One of the volunteers said it
will soon be even larger, and that it is supposed to look like something that
mission restoration workers would have lived in during the 1930’s – but they
had pictures of that workers camp in the museum, and they looked nothing like
this new building.
The mission complex is pretty large, and includes a lot of
rebuilt outbuildings as well, such as for the blacksmith, the potters, the wool
workers, the soldiers, etc. They had
very few informational signs compared to the other missions – some rooms had no
signs, and some had very basic signs just to explain what the room was for. It is more complete than most missions, and
still has that sprawling undeveloped feel because of the empty land all around
it. The only comparable mission would be
Mission San Antonio de Padua, which has more original structures but has been
less restored overall (by which I mean that Purisima doesn’t have any ruins
because they’ve all been reconstructed into complete structures, but has less total
buildings, irrigation systems, mills, etc than San Antonio).
We are now at the campground, also located at the edge of
the city, not far from the mission. It
is in a city park, and is nicer than it looked from the road. It appeared to be next to a construction site
or a gravel pit or something, but the actual campground is set back further,
and is next to a big flower field.
Lompoc is known for all the flowers that are grown here for bouquets and
other cut flowers, though this is less common in the area than it used to be.
Finally, a true story that I forgot to mention when it
happened a few days ago, but remembered as I was biking up those large hills
today… While we were touring some historic site, we started chatting with
another tourist about our ride. When we
told him that we were biking from north to south (instead of south to north as
most people tour the missions), he remarked that that was really smart, because
then we’d be going downhill. And he
meant it, too.
Today’s route: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/2860825
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