While we have rambled along the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego, our eyes will often have been caught by the sight of a long, low island well out to sea. It is Santa Catalina, whose reputation as a sea-angler’s paradise is world wide. It has also a most delightful climate—its and San Diego’s being perhaps the most equable of any on the Coast. The marine gardens that line the shores are also of wide fame, and are made visible by boats with glass bottoms, through which one looks down into the transparent waters of another world where waving kelps and sea mosses are the forests and bright colored fish, sea anemones, jelly fish, sea cucumbers and other queer creatures are the inhabitants. The trip thither and return may be accomplished from Los Angeles, between breakfast and evening dinner, if you do not care to stay longer. A hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles lies Santa Barbara (a little city of 15,000), rich in beautiful homes and flowery gardens. It is delightfully situated with the ocean at its feet and the Santa Inés Mountains at its back, and may be reached from Los Angeles either by train or by a picturesque motor drive through valleys, over mountains and beside the sea. Here is the best preserved of all the existing Franciscan Missions in California—never abandoned since its founding in 1786, though now for many a year there have been no Indians in its care. It is the residence of a Franciscan community, and the members in their long brown gowns and white cord girdles may be seen any day at their various tasks about the grounds—one of which is the piloting of visitors through the church. Driving, horseback-riding, playing golf, or simply sitting still and enjoying being alive in the midst of fine scenery, are the principal occupations of Santa Barbara’s visitors. Among the longer drives should be mentioned the 40 miles to the Ojai Valley by way of the lovely Casitas Passes, and the 45 miles across the Santa Inés Mountains to the Mission Santa Inés in the valley of the same name. The latter trip is made more enjoyable if two days are taken to it, the mountains being crossed by the San Marcos Pass[99] into the Valley of Santa Inés, famous for its majestic oaks, and the night passed at Los Olivos, 6 miles north of the Mission Mattei’s Tavern at Los Olivos, is one of the most comfortable country inns in California. The return should be made by the Gaviota Pass and the seaside road back to Santa Barbara. The Mission of Santa Inés (which is Spanish for Saint Agnes, whose eve gives title to Keat’s immortal poem), is sight enough to make the trip worth while—with white walls, red-tiled roofs and flowery, corridored front, in a valley rimmed about with mountains. The Mission was long abandoned and in ruins, but when the present hospitable rector took charge some 15 years ago, he began a careful restoration and with his own hands did much of the necessary labor to put it as we see it today.[100]