[See Irish Folly Photo Gallery on page 3.]

Walls To Nowhere

The Witch’s Hat sits atop Killiney Hill, which commands a view of the Irish Sea. Photo courtesy Sally Shivnan.

Frank and I are staring up at a bunch of immense stone arches stacked artfully together. The same way gymnasts climb onto each other’s shoulders and make a human pyramid of themselves is how these arches are arranged. Out of the top of them rises a single, tall stone spire (like a flagpole the gymnasts might hold up). The arches are a lot bigger than gymnasts unless those gymnasts are giants—together the whole structure is 140 feet high and 100 feet wide. Frank asks me, with absolute puzzlement in his voice, “What is it built for?”

“Nothing,” I reply.

Frank is a trim, middle-aged guy in a nice grey suit, with shiny black shoes. Powder blue shirt and dark blue tie. I’m in pants slopped with stains from two weeks of traveling, and beat-up hiking shoes. Frank and I have only just met, an hour before. “Built for no purpose!” he exclaims. He gets it. I smile at him.

I don’t know much about Frank, except that he is a married father of four, a former investment broker who, since Ireland’s economy tanked, now supports himself driving foreign businessmen to and from the Dublin airport in his small black Mercedes sedan. Traipsing about the countryside in my employ, in search of purposeless buildings, the more purposeless the better for my purposes, is a significant departure from his routine.

I’d already explained about them, when he picked me up at my hotel and asked me what exactly these things were. I gave him a basic definition—odd, sort of pointless structures erected for fun by people who could afford them, often as famine-relief projects to provide work for their tenant farmers. I offered a list—towers, temples, sham castles, obelisks, fake caves; the fake caves were sometimes staffed by fake hermits whose job was to jump out and frighten the party-goers. But a folly in the flesh is worth a thousand words, and standing now before the one called Conolly’s Folly—the massive arrangement of arches and its single, soaring obelisk—Frank is enchanted. He’s hooked.

We are folly hunters. We take off in hot pursuit, Frank refusing to use the SatNav, determined to sniff them out without any help. I explain further, about how they were all the rage in the 18th and 19th centuries among the Irish grand-country-house set, and how I am interested in not just those folks, but in the people who physically built the follies, especially during famine times. I say to Frank, think how they must have felt, building these crazy absurd structures for their uber-wealthy landlords while trying to ignore the hollow gnawing in their stomachs—they would have been grateful for the work, I suppose, but at the same time…

Your ancestors and mine, I want to say to Frank but don’t. Not sure why I don’t—a little self-conscious about playing the Irish heritage card, I suppose. We chat about sports, the economy—Frank resents that he’s lost his business despite never doing anything stupid or irresponsible, unlike the high-rolling greedy people who brought Ireland, and the world, to the state it’s in. He talks about his kids, the eldest just out of college with a degree in marketing, about to emigrate in search of work. These are hungry times again, in their way. We float along in the car, through the green interior of Ireland, past pastures and golf courses, cottages, villages. I notice that the cream-colored leather upholstery of the armrest below my window is scuffed, grubby.

The largest folly in Ireland is the Jealous Wall, and the story behind it is as marvelous and creepy as its name. It starts in 1740 with Robert Rochfort building a big house on a lake. He suspects his wife of cheating on him with his brother, so he confines her to his other house where she has no contact with the outside world for 31 years. She has to walk around with a servant ringing a bell when her husband visits so he can avoid running into her. But these visits are rare, as he spends most of his time at his estate on the lake, where another of his brothers—by all accounts an instigator of the adultery rumors and by this time not someone Robert is fond of—starts building an even bigger house of his own just half a mile from Robert’s property line. It’s situated to block Robert’s best view, and, as a final snub, it is turned away from Robert’s house, its rear end, so to speak, in Robert’s face.

So Robert builds a wall. A freestanding, three-story, 180-foot-long pseudo-crumbling Gothic wall-to-nowhere incorporating curves, corners, a half-turret at one end, and numerous arched, rounded, and square window openings and doorways. Now when he looks out from his house, he sees this wall, rather than his brother’s place. It’s a compromise. It has its parallel in the way he imprisons his wife since he cannot go back in time with her to the way things were before.

Whether she had the affair she was accused of has been debated and will never be known. When Robert died, age 66, they came to let her go. The first words of the poor half-mad woman, who at this point couldn’t speak above a shrill whisper, were “Is the tyrant dead?”

The Jealous Wall was not built for famine-relief but for rage relief. Many follies were built during periods of famine, though, including that huge pile of arches, Conolly’s Folly. In some places you can find follies built during the Great Famine of the 1840s standing alongside others built during the less well known but equally devastating famine of the 1740s, which killed nearly 40 percent of the Irish population. At these sites you might find no follies from the intervening hundred years, however, as if the folly-building urge hit only once a century, triggered by tragedy. The whimsical nature of follies, under the circumstances, seems more than a little bizarre, and this incongruity is, I know, a big part of what drives my curiosity.

One such place, with follies separated by the century between the two famines, is Killiney, half an hour south of Dublin. I took the train there, much of the way running right along the strand around Dublin Bay, the fishing boats and pleasure boats like toys bobbing on the glittery blue water. When I stepped from the train and looked up to the hilltop above the village, I saw the funny, pointy cone of the oldest of the Killiney follies—a white-cement dunce-cap sticking out of a blocky little building, crowning the steep, wooded hill. I started walking up, along lanes that snaked between high stone walls concealing the country homes of the new gentry—Irish celebrities of the sort who go by one name, Bono, Enya—and after a half-hour climb I stepped from the shade of oaks and beeches into sunlight and a wide expanse of grass, and I beheld the folly’s weird white cone poking up into a blue-and-cloudy sky. A marble plaque embedded in the wall beneath the cone reads:

LAST year being
hard with the POOR
the Walls about these
HILLS and THIS
erected by
JOHN MAPAS
Esq. June 1742

Mr. Mapas seems not to have known what to call the thing he’d built and the best he could come up with was “THIS.” His THIS commands a view to the east of the Irish Sea, and to the south the picture-postcard sweep of Killiney Bay and beyond it the Wicklow mountains, friendly and pastoral-looking. Other follies share the hilltop: a second, smaller cone-topped structure called the Witch’s Hat, a miniature stepped pyramid about 15 feet tall that kids can clamber up, and a couple of spooky stone-slab structures that look like ancient sarcophagi, these all built a hundred years later, during the next terrible famine. Even though I should have known better, I acted just like Frank when I saw those pseudo-sarcophagi—I couldn’t help myself, I had to ask what they were for. Seriously—a pair of austere, somber, fake stone tombs sitting in the middle of the grass all by themselves? I stopped a guy who looked like he’d know; he was riding around in a golf-cart spearing rubbish on a stick. A cigarette dangled from his lip as he worked, and he looked gruff and Irish.

“They’re follies,” he said.

I knew that. “What were these for?”

“Place to ‘ave their tea on!” he called out, spearing a Fanta bottle. “They’re all follies! Buildings built for no purpose!” And he hopped in his buggy and putt-putted away.

John Mapas’s estate, where he built the cone he called THIS in 1742, belonged to a different owner just thirteen years later, and it changed hands three more times before the Great Famine of the 1840s spurred the second round of folly-building there. Today, the mansion that Mapas built, and which later owners expanded, is a four-star hotel that showed a modest operating profit in 2010 but had a loss of €340,000, mostly in bank loan payments. Its total loss on paper for the year, however, was €8 million, the result of writing down the value of the property by €7.9 million. Irish real estate is not doing well. The word folly has many shades of meaning.

It was typical for these houses to change hands a lot, as the Killiney estate did. And Ireland is littered with the ruins of abandoned grand country homes—roofless shells overrun with ivy, gardens gone to grass and thistle. These greatly outnumber the ones that survived as hotels, golf courses, and public parks. Their owners went bankrupt, or simply fled, many impoverished by famine along with their tenants. Famine meant the collapse of the rural economy, on which the landlords depended; they lost the rents from their tenants, the basis of their wealth. There’s a certain ironic karma in the ruin of these landowners by famine, though, since famine was largely the result of poverty, and poverty was caused by injustice and inequality, and injustice and inequality were the products of the feudal system that put Irish land in the hands of the privileged few. In 1849, during the Great Famine, the Encumbered Estates Court was established to deal with all the bankruptcies, and in the decade that followed, 8000 of these properties changed hands. Other landlords moved on when land reform broke up the large estates around the end of the 19th century, or a few years later during the Irish War of Independence. In some cases, the formerly landless farmers were content to stand back and watch the huge, empty houses rot, while in other cases, they burned the places down.

We think of the conflict as between the Irish Protestant ruling class and the Catholic majority, but this oversimplifies it, because there were “dissenter” Protestants in sects that were discriminated against just as Catholics were, and there were Catholic landowners who acquired Protestant holdings during certain periods, and there were Catholics who had once been Protestants but who changed religious affiliation hundreds of years back. There were, as well, Irish Protestant aristocrats who were as passionate about the cause of Irish independence as any Catholic. The lines get blurred, even if you leave out the occasional, inevitable unsanctioned encounter between wealthy landlord and peasant serving girl. Anywhere you go in the Republic of Ireland you find both Gaelic and Anglo surnames, though all these folks are Irish, and mostly Catholic. Irish people’s ancestry is a complicated mix, as is true for all humans, and the Irish are walking around with the DNA of the colonizers, as well as the colonized, inside them.

Ireland’s Follies The Saturday Evening Post

We flew American Airlines’ business class, and knew in advance that they do not provide vegan meals and neither does the airlines’ Admirals Club Lounge. Fortunately there is a food court near the lounge for the plebeians, and Emily was able to get a rice and tofu dish. There was little for her to eat on the plane, just plain rolls and nuts. We were all comfortable, checked into the Ritz, and arrived in time for breakfast. After discussion with the maître d’, Emily was quite satisfied with their steel cut oatmeal (made with hot water), fresh fruit juices, and baguettes with jams and jellies. We had established that the French baguette, which we all love, is made with flour, water, and yeast.

So far a good start. The Ritz breakfast staff, in its elegant dining room, was quite attentive; and my suspicion was that we were not the first vegans. Also, we were well fixed for lunch. There was a familiar Belgian chain (with outlets in New York) called Le Pain Quotidien quite near the Ritz, 2 rue des Petits Carreaux, in place du Marché Saint Honoré. Their food is good and fresh, and, best of all, vegan dishes are marked with a carrot. Emily had the soup of the day (tofu with seaweed) and different tartines on gluten-free buckwheat crusts: the avocado with chickpeas, cucumber, and spicy tahini and the organic black bean hummus with avocado and spicy tahini. There were many tartines, and even a quiche, that Linda and I found digestible.

Since we were going to be in Paris for four nights, we had to plan accordingly. Emily came prepared with a list, and we had a serious discussion with the Ritz concierge team. It quickly became obvious to us that they were not well-versed in veganism. They recommended a well-known Chinese restaurant called Tong Yen in the 8th Arrondissement near the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Apparently former Presidents Bill Clinton (now almost a vegan) and Nicolas Sarkozy were among the celebrities to frequent this long-established Parisian restaurant. As you know, the Ritz concierges take making reservations very seriously, so they handed us a typewritten confirmation, which we gave to the doorman. “Monsieur,” said the doorman, “our chauffeur is free just now, and will gladly take you to the restaurant. Just give him a small tip.” So the three of us jumped into the back seat of a black Jaguar limo where we met the Ritz’s elegant driver, George.

He approved of our reservation, again informing us of all the celebrities who go there. It was a short ride to the Tong Yen, which reminded me of any upscale Chinese restaurant in hundreds of malls throughout the U.S. The staff treated us very nicely and escorted us to a comfortable table on the second floor. Emily was nervous with the menu since nothing was not clearly listed as vegan. She settled for a made-up dish of tofu, baby corn, mushrooms, and bok choy on a bed of rice, Linda chose the Filet de turbot à la vapeur, and I had shrimp and peas on fried rice. All the dishes were very good, on par with similar fare in the U.S.

The next evening, we jumped into the backseat of our usual Jaguar limo and handed our typewritten reservation on Ritz stationary to George the chauffeur:

Loving Hut 92 bd, Beaumarchais.

Interestingly George, who was used to driving royalty to restaurants like Le Grand Véfour and La Tour d’Argent, seemed a little curious that we’d chosen a rapidly growing chain. There are over 200 Loving Huts throughout the world. However, this particular Loving Hut was smallish, in a remote neighborhood, and had bare-bones decor.

Emily loved the Loving Hut, and I admit we were not unhappy. We were treated very nicely, and I am sure the typewritten reservation from the Ritz was their first. The dishes (mostly vegan and clearly marked) included “large salad with vegan cheese”; “vegan pizza with salad”; and “veggie cheese crepe”—which was delicious. The drink menu contained “fresh-pressed vitality organic juice” and “elixir of youth cocktail.” Next to our table, there was a small birthday party for a woman. I was informed that she, a lifelong vegan, was 63 years old, but she looked 83.

The next evening we were back in the Jaguar with George, who was not surprised by our reservation for Le Grenier de Notre Dame, 18 rue de la Bucherie. This place was Parisian-established vegetarian, and some vegan, since 1978. Again a somewhat bland decor, side-street entrance, and the ingredients in the dishes were the usual bulgur wheat, tofu, vegetables, etc. The desserts, a pear crumble and soy ice cream, were good.

Our last meal in Paris was at Saveurs Végét’Halles, 41 rue des Bourbonnais. Unfortunately George was busy, so we hailed a taxi, which took us to Avenue du Bourbonnais (a €10 mistake). This was a similar establishment to the previous two restaurants, serving grains, soups, vegetables, tofu crumbles, and juices. Emily enjoyed it all, but we were getting weary. I must say every time we returned to the Ritz, the concierge seemed quite interested in the restaurants, and what we ate. This is typical French. They take food seriously.

Linda and I noticed a few things about vegan eating. First of all, our stomachs felt great and our digestive systems worked better than ever. Also, the cost per meal for all three of us averaged $85 per night. And most amazingly, we both lost about three pounds!

After arriving in New York, the next night we each ate two large sirloin steaks.

Letter from Paris: Touring the City of Light…with a Vegan The Saturday Evening Post

While Yelp’s a handy little thing, claiming the broadest range of restaurants in its database, sometimes it’s refreshing to try something a little different. We’ve rounded up six of the best food-spotters, including a couple you might not have heard of.

1. Urbanspoon

Admittedly, this app is almost as well-known as Yelp, but it comes with such a great gimmick that we couldn’t leave it out. If you don’t know quite what you want to eat, Urbanspoon’s “shake” feature makes the decision for you by randomly picking a restaurant from the area to match your criteria.

In addition to that handy feature, the database itself is well stocked with information on all sorts of local eateries, including reviews from fellow diners and professional critics. Urbanspoon is really the granddaddy of dining apps—it has been around since the iPhone App Store launched in 2008.

Download: Urbanspoon for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Kindle Fire
Price: Free

2. Zagat to Go

This is the most pricey app on the list, coming in at $10 for iPhone and iPad users and $25 for Android users. It’s important to realize just what you get for your money—this isn’t just another variation of the same features offered by everything else.

Based on the best-selling Zagat books (which retail for about $15), this app compiles the same amount of information that you would find in 45 individual city guides. That includes detailed info on each of Zagat’s rated restaurants, of course!

It also features one very, very handy feature that makes it well worth the price of admission: offline mode. When you’re traveling overseas or somewhere without access to 3G service or Wi-Fi, offline mode is invaluable. All of the information you need is stored directly on your phone, so you can search, browse, and choose to your heart’s content.

Download: Zagat to Go for iPhone, iPad, and Android
Price: $9.99 for iOS; free for Android (but $24.95/year after a six-month free trial)

3. Eat St.

Taking a slightly different approach to searching for eateries, Eat St. comes courtesy of Food Network, which has created a searchable database to help you find the best food trucks and street food in your city. Perfect for your inner foodie hipster, the GPS-enabled app shows map locations for stationary food carts plus any mobile trucks that pop up from time to time. (It’s worth noting that the accuracy may vary for mobile units.)

Where possible, detailed vendor information is provided, including menus and even Twitter contact details, plus the ever-helpful specials and deals on offer.

Download: Eat St. for iPhone and iPad
Price: Free

4. LocalEats

If you’re not a fan of big-name, multinational corporations’ sticking their fingers into your burgers, then this is the app for you. LocalEats only provides information about dining locations that are truly local—not a national chain to be found.

In addition to searching by price range and operating hours, you can even get really crunchy and look for the best local vegetarian eateries. With this in mind, LocalEats is ideal for people who like to try new things, find unique places, and get to know a city’s hidden highlights. If you just want a Big Mac, you’re going to have to keep looking.

Download: LocalEats for iPhone or iPad
Price: 99 cents for iPhone; free for iPad

5. OpenTable

One of the more practical apps on this list, OpenTable helps you find restaurants that have tables available at your chosen time. Enter the restaurant name to find out when tables are available, or enter a date and time to find places nearby that have a spot for you.

Well-suited to spontaneous types commonly in a “What’s for dinner?” quandary, OpenTable does have the ability to search in the future, but it’s better suited to people looking for somewhere to eat right now.

Download: OpenTable for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone
Price: Free

6. Foodspotting

For fans of Pinterest, Flickr, and food porn in general, Foodspotting is a heavenly combination of social networking and photography, with a handy restaurant-finding app thrown in as well. When you load it up, you’re treated to images of dishes other people have submitted. If you’re in the mood for eye candy, you can simply browse the pretty pictures. Otherwise, filter things to show only the latest uploads, the nearest geotagged spots, or the “best” pictures as voted by the community.

It’s a twist on the traditional food finder, as you’re looking for specific dishes rather than restaurants—but sometimes you don’t realize you’re craving a slice of pie until you see it in front of you.

Download: Foodspotting for iPhone and iPad, Android, and Windows Phone
Price: Free

Looking to go off the beaten path?

After all that, if you’d like to find something a little more unusual for your next meal, turn to the masters of the Travel Channel, Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern, and your trusty iOS device. Regardless of which chef you’re more fond of, both Layover and The Bizarre Foods Locator will help you find tasty treats around the world.

Bourdain’s app, inspired by his hit show The Layover, shares his personal favorite hotels, bars, restaurants, and hot spots from 10 major cities. The Bizarre Foods Locator, on the other hand, has presented fans with a list of more than 700 restaurants that Zimmern has eaten at, complete with GPS locations, contact details, and menu suggestions.

Six Apps for Dining on Vacation The Saturday Evening Post

San Juan Capistrano Mission. Photo by Thomas Barrat.

San Juan Capistrano, founded more than 200 years ago, is one of the most visited missions on the El Camino Real. The original church is now mostly ruins.

If I’d had my own car, I don’t think I ever would have received the lesson. But my car was a couple thousand miles away, the rental people had upgraded me to an SUV, and now I was about to pay for lack of fuel economy by running out of gas in the middle of nowhere in a state I didn’t even know had a middle of nowhere.

Which was not exactly the day I’d had in mind.

I’d come to California a few days earlier to follow El Camino Real, the Royal Road, which links together a chain of 21 missions spread from San Diego to north of San Francisco. Built from the mid 1700s into the early 1800s, the missions were not just churches. They were ranches, military outposts, trading posts, schools, houses, dorms, entire towns: self-contained worlds all of their own, converting the Natives with one hand on the Bible and one hand on the gun.

And they were built to be roughly a day’s travel apart by horse and foot. By car, I’d figured, planning the trip at home, I could do the whole thing in five easy days.

Except now I’m about to run out of gas and get eaten by vultures near the end of day three. I’d left the last mission, San Miguel, more than 40 miles back. The nearest gas pump is maybe 30 miles ahead, and the low-fuel warning bell is bonging with increasing frequency. Oh, and dark is coming down fast.

I should have stayed in the quiet chapel of San Miguel and prayed a while longer.

San Miguel Arcángel. Photo by Anton Foltin.

The standard mission chapel is quite simple in its construction: a long, fairly low building, wide enough for two rows of pews and a center aisle. Most are dark inside, since adobe walls made the placement of windows somewhat tricky, and most are plain. This is a bit of a surprise, since before these California missions were going up, architects throughout Mexico and Spain were going wild with the churrigueresque style in which every square inch of every available surface is decorated with cherubs, angels, and whatever else the artisans felt like carving that day.

But apparently, that’s not what California needed. A few of the missions get a bit ornate—Dolores in San Francisco is elaborate enough to make your eyes hurt—but for the most part, these are the churches of people who work hard, people who don’t need the idea of God to overwhelm them in endless scrollwork and bleeding saints.

And a lot of work it was. California State Parks has taken over La Purísima Concepción, near Lompoc, and they’ve tried hard to show what the compounds were like in their prime, when populations were in the thousands and herds of cows and flocks of sheep ran over ranches that stretched past the curve of the earth. Among the restored outbuildings are a blacksmith shop, a kitchen, the priest’s quarters, the soldiers’ quarters (rather less luxurious than where the priests lived), and more. Everything needed to bring the local Chumash under the sway of the King of Spain.

The motivating force behind the California mission trail was Father Junípero Serra, a Franciscan monk, who came to the New World from Spain in 1749. Serra was one of those great men who don’t seem to exist anymore: Whether you needed a roof fixed or were in the mood to argue the finer points of St. Aquinas’ Summa, Serra was your guy. Unless of course you wanted to have any fun, because he was pretty much dead set against that. Biographers of Father Serra write that he believed “laughter was inconsistent with the terrible responsibilities of his probationary existence.” In other words, life is a dress rehearsal for the afterlife, so take it seriously. “Not a joke or a jovial action is recorded of him.” And just in case he was having too much fun having no fun, “he considered it his duty to inflict upon himself bitter pain. He often lashed himself with ropes, sometimes of wire.”

San Francisco de Asís, also known as Mission Dolores, is the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco.
Photo by Steve Heap.

But the man got stuff done. He founded the first nine missions on El Camino Real, from San Diego de Alcalá in 1769, to as far north as San Francisco de Asís, just a bit west of the Bay, in 1776. Before he died in 1784, he had run a total of 15 more, some on the trail, some not, as far south as Baja. Even today, the Museum of the City of San Francisco says his missions “were the first settlements of civilized man in California.” Which opens up certain problems of interpretation, Native history vs. European history, etc., but that’s not the point of this article.

At the mission in Carmel, which Serra had founded in 1771, there is a glass case near the altar. Inside the glass case lie some very old pieces of wood, the remains of Father Serra’s coffin. Sooner or later, the man is going to be made a saint—he was beatified in 1988—and when he is, this tiny, very beautiful mission by the sea is going to be even more a site of pilgrimage than it is now. “We get about 300,000 people a year,” I’m told, as I buy my ticket. Make him a saint, and I figure that number will double.

But it’s quiet right now. I stop in the courtyard, try to imagine the place as it was when an outpost on the edge of the world. Can’t do it; I’m too aware of the very expensive suburb that now surrounds the mission, the distant sound of traffic. Call it a failure of either faith or imagination. I’m not sure which.

A sign by the doorway of the chapel points out that San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo, the mission’s full name, is in an earthquake zone, and adobe doesn’t always hold up so well in earthquakes, especially not 300-year-old adobe. I watch a couple people read the sign, peek in, then walk around to the small graveyard at the side of the church, where the graves are outlined in abalone shells the size of dinner plates, their nacreous colors catching the afternoon light and throwing it back at the church like incense.

Inside, the pew creaks, just a little, when I sit down. And that’s about the only sound I hear until I stand up again, an hour or so later, hesitant to get back in the car and back on the road. But I have more missions to see.

In all, El Camino Real stretches about 600 miles. As a practical matter, for the modern pilgrim, this means a whole lot of driving along Highway 101. By the end of the second day, I’d developed a routine. Leave one mission, set the GPS for next, never forgetting a quick prayer to Saint Christopher, because if the GPS fails, I’m going to need all the saintly intervention I can get. Drive through traffic. Repeat. But then, somewhere north of Santa Bárbara, I leave what I think of as California­—a very long line of cars surrounded by pink roofs—and enter something entirely different. An emptier world, one moving at a slower pace. One where the missions still fit.

Santa Bárbara, or Queen of the Missions, was completely rebuilt after an earthquake destroyed it in 1925. Photo by Linda Armstrong.

I get to three or four missions a day; each has its own unique moment of beauty. The gigantic tree in the courtyard of the mission at Santa Barbara. The smell of incense at San Buenaventura, when I walked into the chapel right after a funeral. It was the only time I went into a mission while it was being used, and for just a moment, it was as if the missions were still holding their communities together.

Over the centuries, some of the missions have become the center of towns. San Luis Obispo is huge, and, unlike the usual long, low building, is airy and L-shaped. Others, like Santa Inés, are so far off the beaten track that if the mission trail did not create a track of its own, they would have slipped completely from history. And still others, like Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, are threatening to return to the elements: The old adobe walls have melted from two centuries of rain, surviving only as stubs, like broken teeth.

I don’t see any swallows flying around San Juan Capistrano, which, of all the missions, is the one that’s most figured out how to make tourism work for it. The highest admission price, the biggest gift shop, and signs that point out the best place to watch swallows—when there are swallows to watch. And that’s the only reason most people come here, or have even heard of the place, swallows flapping back on the same day each year.

With the actual old church at Capistrano nothing but a ruin, the mission has consecrated a small chapel for prayers: And here, it’s the usual long, low box of a room, two cramped aisles of pews. But there’s also the most elaborate altar of any of the missions, and the racks of burning candles make the gold reredos glisten as if wet with new rain.

It is after visiting San Miguel Arcángel—founded in 1797 and now the most complete original chapel—that I find myself in trouble. The chapel is so beautiful, so peaceful, not another person inside, that I linger maybe a bit too long. And when I finally leave, I discover that my plan—buy gas near here before going on to San Antonio—was a bad one. No gas stations. Okay, fine. Map shows a town down the road, they’ll have gas.

Except they don’t. “We like it that way,” says the man in the lone business in the town of … well, I can’t exactly tell where I am, because what I thought was a town on the map was really just a crossroads, and the GPS kind of gave up in disgust a half hour ago. “But the military base might sell you a few gallons.”

The air outside smells like onions, like farms. Back when the missions were first built, all of California was this empty.

What we forget, rolling along so easily in our cars—what I’m about to remember as my car sucks the last fumes out of the gas tank before the military base really does take pity on me and sells me enough fuel to get to the next mission and the next town—is that it wasn’t long ago, not long at all, when the world was a much bigger place, a place where you needed to know there was something familiar at the end of the day. A star to point yourself toward.

Father Serra saw all this space as a clean slate—never mind the people already living there—and thought, yes, I can do something with that. I can do something that lasts, that matters. I can make something beautiful.

And so he started building missions. A place to rest from work. A chance to touch something bigger than even the vast emptiness of the landscape.

I light a candle of thanks in San Antonio, throw a little extra light on the world, climb in the car to the sound of screeching chickens. The mission waits for its next visitor.

The Mission Trail The Saturday Evening Post

Couple taking pictures of themselves with mobile phone. Courtesy of Shutterstock.

1. Kayak

Kayak makes it easy to search for flights, hotels, and car rentals. And features a packing list maker. Track your flight, convert currency, and check out tours or attractions around your destination all in one app.

Download: Kayak for iPhone and iPad, Android, or Windows Phone.
Price: Free

2. TripAdvisor

Find travel information, customer reviews, and travel forums at TripAdvisor. You may find a bunch of Facebook friends are already on TripAdvisor writing reviews! Know before you go which restaurants and hotels are worth visiting. TripAdvisor posted reviews are delayed for verification, to minimize suspicious content and keep everyone honest. TripAdvisor also alerts the owner or manager of any establishment that receives a negative review.

Download: TripAdvisor for iPhone and iPad, Android, or Windows Phone.
Price: Free 

3. TripIt Travel Organizer

TripIt organizes your itineraries so there is no need to print them out. Just link your email account to TripIt, and TripIt will pick up every confirmation number you receive into your inbox. Whether it is a flight, hotel, or dinner reservation, as long as it contains a confirmation number, TripIt will organize everything into one easy-to-access itinerary. If there are any flight delays or last-minute changes sent to your email account, they will also be updated automatically.

Download: TripIt for iPhone and iPad, Android, or Windows Phone.
Price: Free 

4. Where

Eat. Drink. Play. There’s an app for that. Where uses the GPS chip inside your smartphone to create an all-purpose tool to take with you when you travel. Walk, drive, or fly, and Where will find your location and give you on-the-spot information on where to get cheap gas, what the weather will be like, movie showtimes, the best places to eat, traffic conditions, or news headlines. Browse the Yellow Pages or the Yelp directory.

Download: Where for iPhone, Android , or Windows Phone.
Price: Free 

5. MapQuest

Even if you’re not venturing far from home, it’s always good to have a GPS system with you just in case, and MapQuest is the best free app for that. MapQuest makes it easy to find hotels, restaurants, gas stations with prices, and coffee shops at your fingertips. Use the text search option to find less popular locations such as campsites. All locations are labelled along your route to make pit stops easier on the go.

Download: MapQuest for iPhone or Android.
Price: Free 

6. Google Translate

Google Translate saves you from not only buying a library of language books but carrying them around, as well. Google Translate offers over 50 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Type in a phrase or a word, and have it translated on the spot. Google Translate will give you the written translation and the option to hear the phrase spoken. Newer versions of Google Translator Toolkit use human translators to translate entire documents.

Download: Google Translate for iPhone and iPad  or Android.
Price: Free

7. XE Currency

XE Currency calculates the conversions between more than 180 worldwide currencies. Access live foreign exchange rates, up-to-date currency news, and historical rates. You can also choose to receive email updates with currency rates and news or follow the economic indicators calendar. Use XE Currency to create and track comparison charts and to calculate prices even in remote areas.

Download: XE Currency for iPhone and iPad, Android, or Windows Phone.
Price: Free

8. Urbanspoon

Shake up your next great meal, literally. Just give your mobile device a shake and watch nearby restaurants fill your screen like a slot machine. Urbanspoon uses the GPS on your smartphone to pick popular local restaurants throughout the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia.

Download: Urbanspoon for iPhone, iPad, or Android.
Price: Free

9. Wikitude

Wikitude turns your smartphone into a virtual tour guide. Point your smartphone camera at a monument, landmark, or street view, and the augmented reality guide overlays user-contributed content onto the image, putting a wealth of information about the view at your fingertips. Wikitude matches your position to the landmarks you point the camera at and tells you about them.

Download: Wikitude for iPhone and iPad  or Android.
Price: Free

10. Postagram

Postcards for a new generation, Postagram turns sending touristy postcards with clichéd phrases into a cool piece of mail for your family and friends to receive while you’re gone. Just take a photo using your smartphone, and the Postagram app does the rest. Postagram prints your photo onto a postcard along with the mailing address and message you provide from your device, then sends it through the mail. Without even doing so much as buying a stamp, you can send Postcards from all over the world.

Download: Postagram for iPhone  or Android.
Price: Free plus 99 cents per postcard

Ten Handy Vacation Apps The Saturday Evening Post

Photo by Dylan Walters.

Ecotourism has become a hot buzzword when it comes to travel. Defined by the International Ecotourism Society as “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people,” it’s part of the wave of green initiatives sprouting up all over the world. Ecotourism also tends to focus on getting out of the hotel and into the natural world, away from the beaten path and into areas that sometimes get missed, to learn about native cultures and ecology and help preserve the natural beauty and wonders of the planet.

From exotic, far-flung locales like Belize and Iceland to surprisingly green destinations closer to home, we’ve tracked down 12 of the best green travel spots in the world. Start planning your next trip… or just be an armchair tourist!

Photo by Dennis Redfield.

Located on the northeastern coast of Central America, Belize has become a popular ecotourism destination. With thick forests and a gorgeous tropical coastline, the country packs more than 87 distinct types of ecosystems into less than 9,000 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey.

Tourism in general and ecotourism specifically are among the most important industries in Belize, and it’s no surprise. With a spectacular barrier reef (and the world-famous Blue Hole), over a thousand cays (islands), abundant wildlife, and excellent waters for fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, and kayaking, there’s no end to the adventures waiting to be had.

Photo by O Palsson.

On the other side of the spectrum from tropical Belize, Iceland offers a surprising array of ecotourism options. This land of fire and ice is known for its volcanoes, fjords, hot springs, and a nationwide commitment to sustainable and environmentally conscious living. Virtually all of Iceland’s electricity comes from renewable resources, including geothermal, wind, and hydroelectric power, and the Icelandic Tourism Board rewards hostels, hotels, tours, and attractions for green practices.

While you might think of Iceland as a cold and inhospitable environment, quite the opposite is true! The choice is yours, whether you want to spend your vacation relaxing at a geothermal spa, enjoying a whale watching boat tour, or horseback riding in the mountains. You’ll certainly not lack for fun things to do on this northern island. We can’t promise that Eyjafjallajökull won’t spout more travel-disrupting plumes of ash, as it did in 2010, but at least you’d get to witness some striking visuals!

Dry Tortugas

Photo by Hayden.

Located about 70 miles west of Key West, Florida, the Dry Tortugas islands and the waters around them make up Dry Tortugas National Park, a location only accessible by boat or seaplane. You won’t find a single car on any of these islands, and you won’t find any naturally occurring fresh water, either, which is where the islands’ name comes from.

The islands are famous for sea life, coral reefs, shipwrecks, and the unfinished Fort Jefferson, the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere. Popular activities include birdwatching, scuba diving, picnicking, camping, and saltwater fishing. Just don’t forget to bring plenty of water, but you’re on your own if the rum is gone, too.

Burlington, Vermont

Photo by Michael Whitney.

This small New England city, located on the shores of Lake Champlain, is proud of its eco-friendly culture. More than a third of Burlington’s energy comes from renewable resources. Pesticides aren’t allowed on public parks, land, or waterways, and residents have formed an extensive network of citizen-based environmental initiatives. Even the school systems use locally and organically grown food in their cafeterias.

With cold, snowy winters, warm summers, and gorgeous fall foliage, Burlington offers a wide range of activities to suit every interest. Local events include the Festival of Fools (yes, that’s “fools,” not “foods”), the Vermont Brewers Festival, and the Giant Pumpkin Regatta and Festival; Burlington is also home to one of the largest year-round farmers’ markets in the state.

Costa Rica

Photo Courtesy of First Baptist Nashville.

With 20 national parks, it’s not surprising that the Central American nation of Costa Rica has a thriving ecotourism industry. It was also cited by the United Nations Development Programme for attaining high human development and equality as well as environmental sustainability, ranking fifth in the world and first in the Americas in the 2012 Environmental Performance Index.

One of the greenest countries in the world, Costa Rica was a pioneer of ecotourism and offers a huge range of tours, volunteer opportunities, and activities.

San Francisco, California

Photo by Jeff Gunn.

Long a bastion of counterculture icons and progressive thinkers, San Francisco is considered to be the second greenest city in America (after Portland, Oregon). You don’t need a car to get around most parts of the city, with most tourists and residents alike opting to bike, walk, or take public transportation to get where they’re going.

The city also maintains more than 200 parks, from the iconic Golden Gate Park to the Japanese Tea Garden. You’ll find many excellent environmentally-conscious hotels and businesses in the area.

Switzerland

Photo by Francisco Antunes.

Switzerland might be best known for its skiing and alpine views, but this European country is also one of the world’s most environmentally-conscious. Hydroelectric and nuclear power provide most of the country’s electricity, and a far-reaching rail network makes it easy to get around without needing a car.

A little bigger than Maryland, Switzerland is home to biodiversity of both landscapes and climates. From alpine glaciers to lakes, forests, pastures, and the headwaters of several famous rivers that flow across Europe, there’s definitely something for everyone.

Portland, Oregon

Photo by Sam Churchill.

The citizens of Portland like to say that their city, regularly named one of the greenest cities in the world, was green before green was cool. Public transportation, bicycles, and walking are the most popular modes of transportation within the city limits. Green-certified buildings and businesses are on every street corner, and numerous parks dot the landscape.

Forest Park is the largest wilderness park within any city’s limits in the United States; you’ll also find a world-famous zoo, Japanese Garden, and the International Rose Test Garden. With more than 40 breweries calling Portland home, it’s also been named the best city in the United States for happy hour!

Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Photo by Larry Johnson.

Jackson Hole is actually the name of a valley near the border of Idaho in the Teton Mountains. The town of Jackson is its only incorporated town, and the valley is a mecca for tourists exploring Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, and the Snow King and Grand Targhee Resort ski areas.

Jackson is alsohome to the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the Grand Teton Music Festival, and the Center for the Arts, as well as a thriving downtown shopping and entertainment district and a wide variety of sporting activities, from dogsledding to parkour. Many local businesses strive to follow eco-friendly guidelines and green practices, since much of the region’s economy is based on preserving its natural beauty.

Alaska

Photo by Alan Vernon.

America’s largest state is an outdoor lover’s paradise. This state of sweeping vistas, vast wilderness, and spectacular scenery is a prime destination for travelers seeking a connection with nature at its wildest.

The Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association represents more than 300 nature-based tourism businesses, individuals, and organizations offering natural history tours, rafting, fishing, kayaking, hiking, backpacking, wilderness lodges, hunting, and day ocean cruises and charters trips. The association also advocates for sustainability of the state’s natural and cultural resources.

New Zealand

Photo Courtesy of Trailsource.

New Zealand is located in the Pacific Ocean, across the Tasman Sea from Australia. It’s a remote nation comprised of two large islands and numerous smaller islands, a place of distinctive biodiversity that includes a number of species unique to the island. With a geography ranging from steep, snow-covered mountains to tropical beaches, New Zealand’s range of available activities is incredible. Given the country’s distance from the rest of the world, it’s not surprising that sustainability and eco-friendly practices are widespread. Some 31% of New Zealand’s energy supply comes from renewable sources, primarily hydroelectric and geothermal power.

Ecotourism is a thriving industry in the country, with wildlife tours showcasing everything from whales to parrots and activities from kayaking to mountain biking. Many resorts and tour companies cater to the green traveler, with organic, locally sourced, and environmentally conscious accommodations and activities.

Volunteer vacations

Photo Courtesy of BTCV Photos.

Looking for a truly rewarding travel experience? Try a volunteer vacation. Driven by people’s desire to do something to give back to the world, volunteer tourism has grown significantly in recent years, offering experiences ranging from weekend trail repair trips in National Parks to journeys to assist with environmental research in Kenya.

There are hundreds of service organizations that conduct volunteer vacations; check the company’s background and credentials before signing up. Well-known organizations like the Sierra Club and Habitat for Humanity provide excellent options, though many lesser-known opportunities exist as well.

Volunteer trip accommodations range from well-appointed hotels to tents in the woods, so make sure you know what you’re signing up for. If you’re willing to work up a sweat or spend some time helping deserving organizations, a volunteer vacation could be just what the doctor ordered!

Beautifully Green Travel: 12 Ecotourism Destinations The Saturday Evening Post