Show Stopper: View from the Kona side of the Big Island. Photo credit Kuma/Shutterstock.

I didn’t want to go to Hawaii the first time; I got coerced. Why go where everybody else goes? Why go to a cliché of ukuleles and leis? And then, of course, I found out the truth, so the 20 or 30 times I’ve returned have been entirely my idea. I start to feel it, a craving, like that hour before Thanksgiving dinner, and know it’s time to buy a plane ticket. Time to smell ti leaves and watch the skies for pueo, the local owl species.

But even after so many visits, what I mostly do is hang out on Oahu—eating kalua pig at the restaurant I love on the North Shore and letting my friends take me to overlooks that most tourists never see, the vast ocean spread out like a jigsaw, the waves the lines between puzzle pieces. Or the Big Island—losing myself in the volcanoes, looking for where the earth bleeds fire between patches of pahoehoe and a’a lava formations.

And so I make a simple resolve: to mix a trip of places I know and love with places I’ve never been. Ten days, four islands.

Which turns out to be like going to four entirely different worlds.

Moving from island to island in Hawaii is both surprisingly easy—inter-island flights leave about every 10 minutes—and a major pain in the butt if you don’t like to fly.

I don’t like to fly.

The original Polynesians moved around by boat, and for reasons of my own, I’ve spent the past five years looking at traditional canoes all around the Pacific. So I want water. The problem is, thanks to local politics and a relatively obscure law known as the Jones Act, Hawaii is without an inter-island ferry system. So that means a very, very small cruise ship run by InnerSea Discoveries: 100 feet, 25 other passengers, somebody else to do the cooking. I’m OK with that. And I’m really OK with an itinerary that puts me back on two islands I know well—the Big Island and Maui—and two I’ve never seen before, Lanai and Molokai.

Berry Best: Kona is renowned for its spectacular coffee.

Traveling to the Big Island is always like going back to an old friend. Or maybe two friends, since the opposite halves of the island are so different: the wet, jungly Hilo side and the dry, almost stark Kona side, where about all that grows is coffee on very tiny plantations (two acres is a pretty big outfit) and flowers roughly the size of serving platters that seem to be there just for the fun of it.

My traveling companion, Daz, sees the convertible at the rental place, and I know we’ll be doing the Big Island topless. I was here last year; she hasn’t been since she was a teenager, but it takes no time at all to agree on what to do: Head south, towards the last thing Captain Cook saw. Stories vary, but we can be sure of this: There was a scuffle, and Cook came out on the wrong side of it. The man who had sailed more of the globe than anyone else had his final view of the world at the Big Island’s Kealakekua Bay. And when we get there, I think that’s not a bad last thing to see: an arc of cliffs protecting the land while spinner dolphins live up to their name, catching sunlight and turning their reflections into corkscrews, wild as Daz’s hair as we drive the highway with the top down.

A Different Hawaii 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

By now, you’ve probably realized that there are a lot of online options for buying plane tickets, booking hotel rooms, and finding your way around a new city. But what about figuring out exactly what to do while you’re there? In ages past, travelers would go to a local bookstore to pick up a paperback destination guidebook. You’d spend some time dog-earing pages and circling interesting items, and then hope that the information wasn’t outdated by the time you actually arrived.

Now, the internet provides a plethora of travel information to help you not only find the best deals but also discover the amazing details that can really make your travel experience one to remember. These seven websites can help you find the best places to shop, the most interesting enclaves off the beaten path, or the most unusual activities once you’ve arrived at your destination.

1. Frommer’s

Frommer’s has been one of the most popular travel guides since the 1950s, when the company released the classic Europe on $5 a Day. Now in addition to its print guidebooks, Frommer’s has an extensive website offering all sorts of tips and ideas for traveling around the world.

If you already know where you want to go, start with the Destinations tab, where you’ll find an impressive amount of details about a wide range of locations. Each destination entry essentially has an entire guidebook’s worth of information at your fingertips. Not sure where you’d like to go for your next vacation? Try the Dream Trip Recommender, an interactive page where you can select options and choose how important various aspects like luxury, culture, food and drink, and nightlife are to your choice. The website will then suggest options that might fit your requirements. The Trip Ideas and 100 Family Trips tabs also offer suggestions for places to go and things to do with your next chunk of free time.

2. Fodor’s

Fodor’s is the world’s largest publisher of English-language travel and tourism information. With hundreds of guide pages highlighting top destinations around the world, each location entry features an overview of sights, restaurants, hotels, entertainment, shopping, activities, and travel tips. A section called Fodor’s Choice highlights some of the most interesting options and a brief primer on the language spoken in that location. Fodor’s also includes extensive information about hotels, restaurants, and cruises around the world, and for the somewhat more budget-conscious, the Deals section lists some of the more affordable options.

3. Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet is the largest travel guidebook and media publisher in the world. Aimed at backpackers and other budget travelers, it offers both standard tourist information and a hefty offering of destinations and options off the beaten path, letting travelers explore the real countryside outside the typical souvenir shops and well-worn photo ops.

Lonely Planet offers hundreds of articles about everything from Europe’s hidden gems to a guide on packing light. If you want a more personal web experience, the Thorn Tree Travel Forum is touted as the oldest travel community on the web. There, you can chat with other travelers to get advice and ideas about everything from getting a good latte in Lesotho to traveling through Tibet.

4. Rough Guides

Like Lonely Planet, the Rough Guides guidebooks were originally marketed to low-budget backpackers, though Rough Guides has now expanded to include travelers on all budgets. Containing information for hundreds of destinations, Rough Guides helps you plan your trip with tips about accommodations, restaurants, sights not to be missed, and tips on when to travel.

An ever-expanding library of articles about everything from local festivals to trips for first-time travelers will help whet your appetite for adventure, and a photo gallery features gorgeous images from around the world. You can also purchase hard copies of specific guidebooks, phrase books, pocket guides, and maps.

5. Rick Steves

Travel aficionados and lovers of public television are probably already aware of Rick Steves, the eternally cheerful travel writer, host, and tour guide whose Europe Through the Back Door series is incredibly popular. As the title implies, the books and website focuses on travel in Europe, including destinations from Scandinavia to Turkey.

A large library of travel tips and articles helps even the most nervous traveler feel confident traveling alone or with a group, and the website’s Graffiti Wall is a huge online community of travelers eager to share their experiences and advice. Articles about individual cities, regions, and entire countries can be found in the Plan Your Trip section, offering invaluable advice and suggestions.

6. Let’s Go

The Let’s Go series is unique in that it is entirely researched, written, edited, and run by students and was the first of the budget and backpacker travel guides. In addition to the usual information about tourist sites, accommodations, and restaurants, you can also find details about hostels, travel deals, and “beyond tourism” options such as volunteer or temporary work opportunities.

Personal stories from travelers young and old can be found under the Stories tab, offering tantalizing glimpses into some of the most unique destinations on the planet. Recent posts include “24 Hours in Norway” and “Desert Wanderings of a Solo Female Nomad” — sure to get your travel itch going.

7. WikiTravel

Following the model of Wikipedia, WikiTravel aims to create “a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide.” With almost 26,000 destinations currently in its database, it’s certainly well on its way. Most entries start with a section of general information and include details like getting to and around the destination, languages and currency, tourist destinations, food and drink, and culture.

Much like its larger sibling, WikiTravel is an easy website to get lost in. You’ll find yourself clicking link after fascinating link as you explore the world full of options. Since this is such a dynamic, user-created community, you can also be assured that information is probably even more timely and up-to-date than that coming from publishers that have to wait until the next publishing cycle to update their guides.

Know before you go

While there’s something to be said for heading out and going wherever the road takes you, it’s generally a good idea to have some sort of plan in mind before venturing into the great unknown. Whether you’re a backpacker looking for an inexpensive trip to the wilds of South America or a family interested in exploring the arts and culture of Europe, you may never need to purchase another guidebook again if you first spend some time exploring these websites!

7 Online Travel Guides to Help Make the Most of Your Next Trip The Saturday Evening Post