Oh, the Places You'll Go!
By Alan Mittelstaedt & Alfred Lee & Andy Klein & Anthony Miller & Rebecca Schoenkopf & Ron Garmon
Day Trip!
Oh, I know exactly what you think of Orange County – it’s there in the tender curl of your lip, the flaring of your elegant nostril, the cadence of your whining as you bitch about the yokels who reside in its limits. You, my dear, are better than it, and I can’t say as I blame you.
However! You may also want to shut the fuck up and just enjoy something for once in your superior life, because if you get on the train, have a bloody Mary, and exit in San Juan Capistrano, you will have a fabulous, delicious, sun-soaked (and liquor-soaked) day to remember or not.
From the moment you step off the
Surfliner in San Juan, you’re surrounded by the oldest neighborhood in the state, the Los Rios Historic District with three original adobes among its 40 homes on its lush little roads. There’s a petting zoo, and a little adobe museum that looks like a prison cell, and a teahouse where you can sip elegantly on tea from pretty china and nibble delicately on a scone, all while having perfectly dreadful conversations about ass, if you, like my old boss, are someone you can’t take anywhere. You could do that. Especially the petting zoo. And the ass.
But the real place to be is at the Ramos House Café, for a fairly pricy but exquisite breakfast or lunch under a tin roof on the patio abutting a working garden where they grow the herbs for their cocktails and fine American cooking. (There is no inside seating, because the owner, John Q. Humphries – who is a little bit delicious himself – lives in it.) I once had toast there that I would have paid $9 for, while floating through the air were the tolling of the mission’s bells, the clang of an oncoming train, the chimes from the house itself, and a sound system out of which wafted Fishbone and the Pogues.
After you’ve got a foundation on which to lay your booze, you can walk a block or two to the Swallow’s Inn. There, felons, Marines, rednecks and Apaches take turns smacking their girlfriends while you are doing the Boot Scoot Boogie (or else standing in the middle of the floor doing your hippie dance instead; I for one don’t believe dancing should have rules). Afternoons are good and drunk at the Swallow’s, but nights are better, because that is when old men with wooden legs (for serious) will ask you to dance from all the way across the room just by looking at you and cocking an eyebrow, and you will answer just with a widening of your eyes, and then meet them wordlessly in the middle of the floor. But this is a daytrip, and the last Surfliner returning northward is at 10:40 p.m. on weekends and 9:40 on weeknights, and you will probably be having so much fun that you miss your train, and we can’t be having that.
Or can we?
If you remembered to do something cultural before you ran off for your slumming, the Mission San Juan Capistrano would have been a good choice. You have to pay to get in, and the exhibits are sorta eh – lots of Orange County’s beloved plein air – but you can also take a few moments in the Serra Chapel, which dates from 1783 and is absolutely lousy with fancy gilding applied by Junipero’s Juaneno slaves. Also? Their ghosts!
—Rebecca Schoenkopf
Published: 05/14/2008
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Comments
Wow, you're so right - and to think that all along everyone's been thinking Hitler was this bad, inconsiderate dude!
The train! The train!
The BEST WAY TO TRAVEL!
Funny (as usual) and to the point (also, as usual.)
I am really, really, really, really glad you are the editor.