California Mission San Juan Bautista~Tuesday

This is my most recent addition to my Etsy store. I took this in the late 1990s on one of many trips taken there for an afternoon away from Santa Cruz. It took about an hour to get there and it was always such a peaceful and relaxing place to go. Quiet and like stepping back in time. Often there were small festivals held there where they would do demonstrations of how to weave baskets or carve a wooden toy. I was always fascinated with this place because it was where Alfred Hitchcock filmed Vertigo. Being a huge fan of his I was thrilled to see where he set his final scene of that movie. There was a small cemetery behind the church where the original Fr were buried. From the looks of their website which I include as a link here you can see that in 10 years they have cleaned the place up quite a bit since I took this photo. Here is an excerpt from their website"

The Old Mission San Juan Bautista...

...began with a group of leather-jacketed soldiers and a few Native Americans watching a tonsured Franciscan priest raise his eyes and hands toward the sky...

"In the name of our blessed Father, and the saint whose feast we commemorate today, St. John the Baptist..."

The day was June 24, 1797, a Saturday, and the priest was Fr. Fermin de Lasuen, Presidente of the California Missions successor to Blessed Junipero Serra. This mission was one of four established by Fr. Lasuen in the summer of 1797 and the fifteenth of the twenty-one missions in Alta, California.

Construction began almost immediately under the care of Fathers Jose Manuel de Martiarena and Pedro Martinez. By Christmas, because of the friendly and
cooperative indigenous people, not only was there an adobe church built but also a grainary, barracks, a monastery, and some adobe houses...
If you are ever in that area of California, drive off the road about a mile when you see the sign and visit this mission. Its really quite a nice one.