Day 19 - 21 - Turning Around and Heading "East Bound!" via Palm Springs and Tuscon

"We've got a long way to go,

and a short time to get there.

I'm east bound -

just watch Ole' Bandit run!"

After Santa Monica, we decided it was time to turn back east.  We wanted to keep our trip to four weeks or less, which left us a little over a week to get home.  This part of the trip was much less planned than the first half.  We knew we wanted to get to Tucson to visit Joe and Amber, but we didn't have a plan on how we wanted to get there or how we wanted to get home from there.  For now, we decided Palm Springs seemed like a worthwhile half-way point, and we weren't disappointed!  Palm Springs was much quieter than Santa Monica, felt much safer, the accommodations were MUCH nicer, and to be honest...we had both been waiting for our chance to sing "East Bound and Down!" from Smokey and the Bandit.  We had to keep skipping it on our playlist until now! 

We decided to walk to dinner despite the extreme heat.  It never even occurred to us to check the weather.  Well, we found a restaurant we liked about a mile to a mile and a half down the main road from our hotel.  Partway through our dinner, we heard the rain start coming down.  And it came down and down and down for about thirty minutes.  When we were ready to leave, this is what it looked like outside - streets completely flooded!  I guess that's what happens when it rains in the desert!  We decided to call an Uber (our second of the trip!)...

We were a little sorry we couldn't stay in Palm Springs longer.  It was such a pleasant surprise!  Our hotel had really well-furnished and well-decorated rooms and an awesome swimming pool...and it was adults only, so you could actually swim in the pool!  But we wanted to stick to our four week timeline, so it was time to head for Tucson.  Before leaving California, we stopped by Joshua Tree National Park.  The women working at the visitor's center were so proud of their park and their knowledge of it.  They gave us way more information than we needed for a short drive through.  But in the end, they probably gave us the most important information - while it was possible to drive through the park in our little Miata, there was another monsoon season downpour on the way, and the roads would probably wash out and become trouble for our little rear-wheel-drive car.  So, while we really would have liked to drive through the park, we ended up going back the way we came in and sticking to the highways for our drive to AZ.

  We have to thank Joe and Amber so much for being the reason we discovered Arizona.  Neither of us ever thought we would enjoy the desert, but it was probably one of our favorite parts of the trip!  Who knew there were mountains like this in Arizona?  We were picturing the desert landscape of Roadrunner cartoons, but this was so much more.  Now we know how people can stand the desert heat - because if you get too sick of it, you can just drive up into the mountains and enjoy a cool, refreshing day!  The views aren't bad, either!  

We stayed at a bed and breakfast right in Tucson, just a few blocks from the University of Arizona.  We both loved this bed and breakfast, run by a free spirited woman who settled down in her hometown to open and operate this B&B after many years of wandering and enjoying life.  For those of you reading this blog that know Judy Gaffney, she reminded us so much of her!  And she cooked up an amazing breakfast with lots of fresh ingredients from her own garden including homemade jellies!  Oh my gosh!  Yum!  The town and the University made for a great morning run for Kerri.  She even got a complement from one of the locals for getting it done out there.  It's always nice to get a little encouragement!  The college-town atmosphere made us both feel at home, and there were a lot of neat shops, restaurants, and bars to visit.  We chatted about our hometown artist Keith Haring while shopping at the art store and picked up some fun stickers and a cactus shirt for souvenirs.  We didn't realize it until we saw them in person, but it turns out...Kerri loves Saguaro Cacti.  

Lucky for Kerri, Saguaro National Park was on our way out of town!  We got to stamp our National Park passport for the second time in three days!  You didn't have to go to the park to see the Saguaro - we saw them all the way up the mountain when Joe took us sightseeing and quite a few other places around the area.  But they were so cool! The cactus behind me is over 100 years old, because they don't produce their first flower and first arm until they are 95-100 years old.  They take ten years to grow one inch tall!  That seems incomprehensible when we think about how fast those little pine tree seedlings grew that we used to get in school on Arbor Day.  

Again, we were sorry we had to leave so soon, but our bellies were full of delicious breakfast, and it was time to continue the adventure home.  We had quite a few options of how to go home from here, and we had decided that we were going to follow Old Route 66 for some fun road-trip sights.  Our little MX5 was ready and raring to go!