Happy New Year

Happy New Year to each of you. May this new year bring you good health and fun times, joy and peace.

It’s been an interesting few days. Tired of cold scrambled eggs for breakfast at the motel, we went into Santa Barbara to enjoy a more varied meal at a local breakfast place. Driving around Santa Barbara, I wondered what it would be like to grow up there. Usually I wonder about that when we get to some little town in the middle of nowhere, but I wondered in Santa Barbara, too. I wonder, because where we grow up affects our expectations and our sense of what is normal. I grew up in a large midwestern working-class city with large populations of eastern Europeans, African-Americans, and people who’d moved up from the hills of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. I’m sure that environment affected me. To me, Santa Barbara seemed almost unreal. Lovely, but a bit unreal.

Then it was into the craziness of LA. We stayed mostly in the San Fernando Valley, so we escaped the worst of it. But our experience was mostly freeways. How much of LA land area is devoted to freeways? We did, however, get off the freeway to go through some very nice neighborhoods in Pasadena and a much less prosperous one in Azusa.

Heading southeast of the city, we took a short side trip over the hill to Menifee. As we crested the hill, we saw this huge tract of similar homes covering the near-desert. I checked Wikipedia, trying to discover why Menifee even exists let alone why it houses so many people. It was settled in the 19th Century as part of the Inland Empire but wasn’t incorporated as a city until 2008. We never saw the old part of the town, if it still exists. We only saw a huge bedroom community. Perhaps most of the residents commute to San Diego, and have moved far enough out to be able to afford a good-sized house and small yard only to suffer an hours-long commute. (I did that in the DC area. It really eats up your days.)

The next morning we left Temecula in light rain and headed southeast on a twisty two-lane up over a rugged area to Santa Ysabel, population 869, where we were surprised to find a delightful little restaurant. We had a nice mid-morning snack as we charged the car. The road continued over the hills, sometime rising above 4,000 feet. We passed the Palomar Observatory in the rain falling from a solid cloud cover. Eventually the rain dwindled out as we dropped down to the desert floor west of El Centro. 

We had been on the two-lane, which at times was very twisty, for three hours, and not once did we come up behind a slower vehicle and no one came up behind us to breathe down our necks. Astounding!

Then it was all freeway again. East of El Centro, there are areas where off-roaders come to play on the sand. We passed several groups of RVs that had formed protective circles around the four-wheelers, like pioneers circling the wagons.

We spent an afternoon and full day in Yuma, visiting some of Andrea’s cousins who winter there – one from Washington and a couple from Iowa. It is always wonderful to spend time with them. It was New Year’s Eve and we celebrated the holiday with them, but we were back at the motel before dark.

Tonight we are in Scottsdale. Tomorrow we head south through Tucson and then east. Surprisingly, we have only once encountered air temperatures above 70º, and that was briefly along the coast. Mostly it has been cloudy and cool – warm, but cooler than what we usually expect in this area of the country.

Today is the first day of a new year. It is also the mid-point of our trip – in days, not miles.