On a Mission part 2--San Jose

I next drove to the San Jose Mission which is the main visitor center for the parks. This is also the largest and best-preserved site of all the missions. In hindsight, I should have started here because the rangers would have been able to tell me about the staffing times at the other missions. While here I took a ranger walk with a group of random visitors. You can do a self-guided tour, and some of the families who chose to do that were reprimanded by our ranger for not being respectful of the grounds (the children, with the apparent consent of the parents, were climbing out of the window openings in the housing section.) So please--if you visit any of our great National Park units, treat them as if they were your own house.

The first pair of layouts started with the right page (as so many of mine do). This is one of the fast-to-fabulous pages. I've found that orange and brown tones work well with the southwest architecture and so I chose to incorporate this page. It helped that my pictures were oriented correctly as these older pages have mats built-in for photos. I trimmed one photo down to 4x4 and used the rest of the mat space as a journaling box. To make the left page match, I chose some scraps of orange and yellow paper to mat photos and the unigrid. I also used the yellow paper and the Medallion border maker cartridge to make the corner border.

Our tour took us through the various parts of the compound which included the church but also the daily life areas such as homes, baking ovens, and the gates of the compound. The interior photo of the church is actually a post card. I rarely photograph inside active churches.

The left page above is the reverse of the F2F from the first layouts shown. I simply had to lay the photos in place and the page was done. On the right, I chose to stack the 3 remaining horizontal photos. That left a 6x12 spot on the right of the page which I filled with scrap orange paper. The journal box matches the F2F front-side page and I found a coordinating mat to frame the last vertical photo.