On our drive from Los Angeles to Monterey, we stopped in the town of Santa Barbara to visit their Franciscan mission (click on the image below to enlarge it). Various iterations and improvements on this place of worship have been underway since 1786 and it represents just one of the missions dotting along the California coast.
The main courtyard houses an enormous fig tree which really benefits from a wide angle lens to try and capture just how completely it fills the area and provides a delightful cooling shade. This courtyard was also home to several species of birds and a number of small lizards which could be found sunning themselves on trees or rocks.
This side gate was a small feature of the entire mission, but for me captured more of what I had expected from an early-settlement California "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" sort of holy place. While the modern mission is very appealing, this part of the wall felt a bit like looking through time to the original building of long ago.
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