Visiting a mission is like taking a tiny trip back in time. The dirt floors. The red, adobe walls. The clay tiled roofs and tiny chapels, decorated in gold leaf. Something about the past seems to linger there … drifting, perhaps, like dust caught in motes of sunlight. According to the Mission website, La Purisima Mission was founded in 1787 by Father Presidente Fermin de Lasuén. In those first few years, several thousand Chumash Indians were baptized into the Catholic faith and lived as a community on the 470 square miles of Mission land. Today, La Purisima is the “most extensively restored mission in the state [of California],” and hosts over 200,000…