As we didn’t have far to go and had time to kill before getting to our hotel in Santa Cruz, we visited San Juan Bautista. This pretty town was once a bustling city in the late 1800s before the railroads took a lot of the stagecoach business away. Now the old hotel, stables, blacksmiths and adobe are protected as a State Historic Park – they have laid out an interesting self guided tour with some entertaining information boards.
These buildings are laid out around a large grassy town square and on one side is the San Juan Bautista Mission complex, founded in 1797 and which became known as the Mission of Music.
In the Chapel there is a door with a cat flap built in so they could catch the mice (yes even in those days!) and you can see animal foot prints on some of the clay floor tiles where they walked over them as they were drying in the sun!!
The San Andreas Fault runs along the hill at the bottom of the cemetery and during the 1906 earthquake the sidewalls of the church collapsed (they were restored in 1976). The remains of the original El Camino Real can also be seen here.
The Mission was featured in several scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Vertigo” and there are a couple of old carriages in the museum that were used too.
We then continued our journey to Santa Cruz – our final stop before handing the car back.
And so our 3394 mile, 5 week, Pacific Road trip has come to an end and the car has been returned!
We did venture into the crazy world of Santa Cruz for a day – if you love the beach, surfing, fishing or amusement parks, this is the place for you.
We walked the length of the 2745 ft wooden pier (longest wooden pier in the US) – never seen so many fisherfolk – and watched the Californian Sealions barking and jostling for a place on the pier supports.
There was a rough sea swim going on when we arrived, which looked like hard work and lots of surfers looking for a good wave. We didn’t spot sea otter 841 though – its making the news as its been hitching lifts on surfboards and then taken to biting the boards and becoming a nuisance so they are trying to catch it to check out its health. We wandered around the famous Boardwalk for a while watching some of the rides – 2 are historic landmarks now (the old Giant Dipper roller coaster and the Charles Looff carousel with 73 wooden horses and a 342 pipe organ – both rather gentle in comparison to the thrill rides of the modern world but lots of people were still queuing to go on them).
Then it was back up the road to the Santa Cruz Mountain Brewery for a good pint and pizza from the food truck next door.
For those who are interested, we used the Moon book “Road Trip USA Pacific Coast Highway” by Jamie Jensen as a rough guide to base our trip on.
Would we do it again? Probably not, but if we did we’d stick to the area above San Francisco and explore Crater Lake, Mount Hood, Mount Ranier and Mount St Helens National Parks.
Now for a few days chilling before leaving mainland US and heading to Hawaii.