Motorbike and Parlor Car Tours Bus at a California Mission, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Motorbike and Parlor Car Tours Bus at a California Mission, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Motorbike and Parlor Car Tours Bus at a California Mission, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-6C5342

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The motorcycle parked alone on the grass shoulder belongs to someone who has clearly arrived under his own power, which in 1960s California already marked him as a different species of traveller than the busload idling a few yards away. The bus, lettered "California Parlor Car Tours," represents the other way people saw the state that decade: seated, narrated, and delivered to the mission gift shop on schedule, with a driver in a dark uniform standing by the arcade like a man who has explained this building's history more times than he can count.

Behind them the old mission arcade goes on being exactly what it was built to be three centuries earlier, indifferent to whether it is reached by tour coach, station wagon, or two-wheeled independence. The parking apron has filled with the era's ordinary machinery, a panel truck and a couple of sedans, none of them aware they are quietly becoming the more interesting artefact in the picture. Everyone here assumed the mission was the historic thing worth preserving; the cars turned out to be right there with it.

A man in a dark coat lingers near the tour bus, the picture of institutional patience, while the rest of the grounds sit empty under the kind of hard, flat midday light that tour operators favour because it photographs the building well and hides how long everyone has actually been standing around waiting for the group to reboard.

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