Saying goodbye to L.A.

Robert Tagorda, who blogs at Priorities & Frivolities, posts that as he and his wife prepare to leave for Harvard, they will be making last visits to favorite spots. He mentions Chili My Soul in Encino, Dino's Burgers, Shahrzad and "an unmarked catering truck, parked somewhere in East L.A. at select hours of the day, where the best huaraches are made."

Lastly, we'll be visiting the San Fernando and San Gabriel missions -- which, oddly enough, are the only two of the twenty-one California missions that we still have yet to see.

That is a quirky fact, given that many of the Spanish missions inspired by Father Junipero Serra and his brethren are rather out of the way. At San Fernando, the only one of the missions located in the city of Los Angeles, Robert should stand outside the front door of the long convento (the largest adobe built in Spanish California) and look to the south, across the Valley. If he can imagine a vast dusty treeless plain with oxen pulling Spanish carretas, and Tongva villages called Tujun-ga and Topan-ga and Cahuen-ga, and think of when the bandit Joaquin Murrieta hid at the mission and Andres Pico ruled it as his private rancho, he is in for a treat. Later, D.W. Griffith used the mission ruins as a location for some of his pre-Birth of a Nation silents. Beautifully rebuilt after the 1971 earthquake, Mission San Fernando Rey de España is one of my favorite history-evoking spots.