Mission Accomplished!

Our daughter, Kate, brought home her fourth-grade assignment: Build a model of one of the California missions.

Why not visit one too? We’d been waiting for a chance to get out of town. Maybe Mission Santa Barbara with its twin bell towers and beautiful facade? No, too close. I was intrigued by San Miguel Arcangel, above Paso Robles, but it seemed too far. Kate agreed that La Purisima, near Lompoc, with its open setting in a state historic park, sounded just right. Consulting the three- to five-day forecast, my husband, Ben, spied a gap between El Nino storms. We drove north on U.S. 101 on a Friday afternoon in March, arriving in Lompoc at 4:30.

We had made reservations at the Best Western Vandenberg Inn--the first entry for Lompoc in the AAA tour book--though they probably weren’t necessary. We checked in and decided to drive to the beach before dinner.

West Ocean Avenue took us out to Ocean Park Road, a one-lane ribbon across wetlands, the public access across Vandenberg Air Force Base land to Ocean Beach County Park. A few rusty boxcars sat on a railroad spur. Where the road crossed the tracks and a stream, we stopped. What was that sound? Frogs! Kate got out, and I followed with sweater and sweatshirt. In the distance we could hear the pounding of the ocean.

At the park we took a walkway under the Southern Pacific bridge, the tide rushing into the Santa Ynez River estuary next to us, and picked our way over a raft of driftwood to the beach, where a man in a wetsuit plied the river mouth on a surfboard. A daunting surf line broke far out to sea on a sandbank washed down the river by the rains.

We walked on the beach, the sunset splashing pink onto the water. I was nine-tenths to nirvana (three hours from home and still only Friday!) when Kate ran back from the water’s edge. “Mrs. Hart has lost her head!” she cried, holding up a plastic doll torso. We instantly assumed the Groucho position (sans cigars) and retraced our steps, casting despairing glances at the water. But there it was, not to be mistaken for flotsam--familiar, red synthetic hair on smooth sand.

On the way back into Lompoc on West Ocean we spotted a small restaurant with a promising number of cars in the parking lot, El Camaron Taquero. As we studied the menu, a couple came in with their daughter, telling the waitress that this was the little girl’s choice for her birthday dinner.

We ordered pozole (pig knuckle and hominy in spicy red broth, served with onion and cilantro), and 6-ounce steaks and cheese enchiladas that came with beans and sauteed green pasilla chile strips. Mrs. Hart wasn’t the only one who went to bed happy.

Saturday was mission day. After a coffee shop breakfast across from the motel, Ben left Kate and me at La Purisima (in Spanish, Mision la Purisima Concepcion de Maria Santisima) and went off in the car to explore. We started with a short walk to a hillside vantage point and saw, tiny below us, La Purisima’s three long, low buildings, its attached, pink-walled graveyard and many outbuildings. (The park is 900 acres and has 12 miles of trails.)

Then we descended and became immersed in the details of what is itself a restoration--the mother of all fourth-grade mission projects. The mission we were seeing was rebuilt on the rubble of La Purisima’s second 1812 structure by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, beginning in 1934, under the direction of the park service.

Adobe bricks and roof tiles were made by hand. Reeds needed to support the roofs were found still plentiful in nearby stream beds, where they’d been planted by the Spanish. Woodworkers re-created beams and doors. Old walls were incorporated in the reconstruction, but modern earthquake reinforcement as well, and at the end of one building, restrooms.

We lingered by the animal pens, where the burros, stripy-faced goats, longhorn cattle and sheep are mission-era breeds. Later we saw pigs and black chickens too. All day, birds alighted on the crooked fence poles and flitted among the grasses and yellow flowers.

There were very few visitors, especially in the morning, but a ranger was barbecuing under the porch roof of the padres’ main residence building, and soon a group spilled out the door. We had happened upon graduation day for La Purisima’s docent training program and discovered that there is a year-round schedule of Purisima’s People days (when volunteers portray mission inhabitants) and Mission Life days (with demonstrations of mission crafts).

Ben met us for lunch in an oak grove, bringing lemonade and submarine sandwiches tracked down in a Lompoc shopping mall. After lunch we walked up the tiny stone aqueduct, which was flowing with rainwater, talking about the mission’s water system. We traced the aqueduct’s course from the fountains and the outdoor laundries--lavanderias--past the corrals, through the enclosed yard of the Chumash girls’ dormitory and across a wide meadow to a spring house. We continued our exploration of the church, where we sat cross-legged on the tiles, and saw the shops, soldiers’ quarters, kitchens, cook yard and gardens.

We finally tore ourselves away in the late afternoon and drove up California 1, hoping for another evening beach walk. We tried to take Brown Road out to Point Sal State Beach (a left turn at the graveyard just before the small agricultural town of Guadalupe), but it was closed, washed out by rain. We consoled ourselves with dinner in Guadalupe, and headed back to the Vandenberg Inn via Lompoc’s Baskin-Robbins. The Vandenberg Inn had all that we want in a motel: cleanliness and relative quiet.

We needed further consolation Sunday morning--because we had to go home--and headed to Solvang for Danish pastries. Passing the turnoff to La Purisima, Kate said, “I love the mission. Will we ever see it again?”

“I’d like to,” I said.

“What about next weekend?”

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Budget for Three

Vandenberg Inn, 2 nights: $132.00

Dinner, El Cameron Taquero: $32.41

Breakfast, Budget Cafe: $20.73

La Purisima entrance fee, one car: $5.00

Sandwiches, Pizza Garden: $13.04

Dinner, Reyes Restaurant: $22.00

Baskin-Robbins ice cream: $5.55

Breakfast, Birkholm’s, Solvang: $13.20

Gas: $35.00

FINAL TAB: $278.93

Best Western Vandenberg Inn, 940 E. Ocean Ave., Lompoc, CA 93436; tel. (805) 735-7731. La Purisima Mission State Historic Park information and programs, tel. (805) 733-3713.