Follow Andrea on her Magical Journey through California
If you ever drive along the coast in northern California and see an arch fighting the tide in the middle of a bay, you may be looking at the door through which Andrea came into our world. And if you are not in a hurry, you may want to follow her in her journey from the barren beaches of the Sonoma Coast to Davis, the University town where her uncle teaches.
o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma_Coast_State_Beach
o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis,_California
Click on the small images below to see larger versions.
But before you reach Davis, you must stop at the Mall, a mall, any mall, that for Andrea would be her first. And so imagine her delight when, used to spend long hours posing for seamstresses to get one dress done, she discovers the multiple outfits available in every store.
Clothes, and books and ice cream, are among the many wonders the mall holds for Andrea. But all these things pale in her mind when in Davis she finds freedom.
The freedom of college life is for Andrea, a Princess from a medieval world who has been living under the strict rules of a king and Father who controls her every move, the coronation of all her dreams. No wonder she wants to stay.
Andrea loves California. She loves hanging out with John, the boy she first met at the beach, and watching him play basketball. She loves driving with her cousin Kelsey across the golden gate bridge and up and down the steep streets of San Francisco even if Kelsey seems to have forgotten that cars have brakes. She loves teaching Kelsey and her fellow actors stage a fight as they rehearse Romeo and Juliet, and she even loves attending her classes.
Click on the small images below to see larger versions.
Yes, Andrea wants to stay in our world. But her uncle, a professor at the Archeology Department, takes her to visit some of the Spanish Missions set along the old Royal Road (Camino real) up the California coast.
Through the history of these missions, Andrea learns how dangerous would be for her world if ours would ever discover its existence. And her resolution to stay dwindles. But not for long.
If you are still with us, I would recommend you visit the missions too. They’re an unexpected window into a time when the Spanish padres (friars) lived in the area.
Andrea visits three missions:
Santa Ines that still stands. Santa Maria that is now in ruins). And La Purisima
In La Purisima, that was destroyed and then reconstructed, docents dressed in the costumes of the time, impersonate the padres and the Native Americans who lived in the mission these 300 years ago.
o http://www.californiamissions.com/cahistory/santaines.html
o http://www.davidksbaja.com/missionsm/page4.html
o http://www.californiamissions.com/cahistory/lapurisima.html
o http://www.lompoc-ca.com/lpc/mission/pictures.shtml
But Andrea’s journey doesn’t end here.
If you ever travel over the continent and across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain, you may want to visit the twin arch where Andrea’s journey started. It stands on the Cathedral Beach in northern Spain, a place where I used to spend my summers when I was young.
This is the arch that inspired the one I described in Two Moon Princess, the arch in Xaren-Ra, the world of the Xarens, that is Andrea’s world.
Click on the small image below to see a larger version.