The Heart of San Juan Bautista

Mission San Juan Bautista State Historic Park is beautiful and so is its little town.  It's simple, old and lovely in a way that authentic old towns are.  If you look very closely; if you jab, poke and look look for flaws, you'll see lots of them.  But, the flaws, when you step back and look at the whole of it, become the exact thing you hope to find when you travel:  Authenticity.  

I don't want to see manufactured happiness or hear recorded messages.  I don't want to be what corporations have calculated I should be or see what they want me to see.  I want to see places like San Juan Bautista that have survived and endured all that its citizens and weather have conspired upon it, and I want to see the streaks of its tears, the laugh lines, the sagging roof lines or the gnarled old trees whose roots bend the sidewalks.  I want to see places that were built out of human necessity, not a corporate calculation to maximize profits and homogenize and neutralize my perceptions.  

San Juan Bautista is old and lumpy and sags at the corners.  Its slip is showing and its shoes are worn, but it is lovely and sweet and more than a little proud.  It surrounds on three sides an old Spanish mission built more than 200 years ago, and the little town moves to and from the mission grounds like the tide flows to and from our shore here in Pacific Grove.  They fill it with joy and sadness, anger and indignation.  As they should, the emotions and ideas of its people appear in its storefronts and along its streets in colors, textures and signs.  

What is most remarkable about this littlest of small old towns in busy, roaring, overpopulated California, is that it retains its charm and authentic character year after year.  Get to know it, and go with an open heart.  Be ready to meet it and sit with it awhile.  Give it time to slow you down to its pace and style.  You'll be the richer for it.