MomCentral is currently running a blog campaign on behalf of Holiday Inn to encourage people to get out and explore their own states-- a "state-cation," if you will. I'm not a native Californian, so this idea intrigued me, since there is a great deal about the state I live in that I don't know. I think I've hit a few of the high points so far (Disneyland, Hollywood, San Diego, Mono Lake, Yosemite, Napa Valley), but there's a great deal more to the state to be explored.
My son is in fourth grade this year, which as everyone who ever attended California public schools knows, is the Year of the Mission. Fourth graders across and up and down the state study California history. Many kids have to complete the dreaded mission project, which usually consists of making a model of one of the California missions from paper mache, matchsticks, salt dough or some other homespun material and drag it into school.
I grew up in Ohio, where we made salt maps of Indian burial mounds, so I missed out on the missions. One of my co-workers who grew up in California told me that it never occurred to her that anyone wouldn't study the missions, since it was a rite of passage for California school children. She was shocked that I'd missed out on this rich cultural experience and instead had to study the eight inconsequential (with a few ignominious) Presidents hailing from Ohio, the two Harrisons (Benjamin and William Henry), Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Taft, and Harding.
Thankfully, Alex's teacher isn't requiring the standard 3-D replica of Mission San Jose, but instead is leaving it up to the kids to come up with a project on the missions, whether it's a video, book, report, or scale model. Maybe a blog would do. Or a Facebook fan page. Or a series of tweets. It's a brave new world in education these days.
Since we're a family who pretty much uses any excuse to hit the road, this seems like a perfect opportunity to take a state-cation, starting with the most northernmost mission, the Mission San Francisco Solano in downtown Sonoma, all the way down to the Mission San Diego. There are 21 missions in all, and each was supposed to be one days' ride on horseback from the next.
We're considering doing a Mission Tour (not on horseback, thankfully) this year, maybe for spring break, doing a day-trip to the local missions and then heading south to San Juan Bautista, San Juan Capistrano, and onward, until we just can't take any more.
If we do this Mission Impossible Tour, I'm sure there will be a Holiday Inn or two along the way, since they often have free wifi and swimming pools, two requirements for any hotel or motel we stay in, wherever we roam. The wifi would be essential to logging in our progress via the blog, and the pool would be needed to knock the dust of history off of us at the end of each day. We had good experiences last year on our National Park Tour with Holiday Inn Express, which were uniformly clean, comfortable, and affordable.
Disclosure: I wrote this review while participating in a blog campaign by Mom Central on behalf of Holiday Inn. Mom Central sent me a gift card to thank me for taking the time to participate.
Photo: San Juan Bautista, taken by me in 1998.