Growing up in Southern California, Palm Springs was always a legendary, iconic place, outside the greater LA metro area, but not “too far”. When I was old enough to visit, though, I found it …. well …. a little boring. I won’t bore you with the details (see what I did there?), but I do have fond memories of nearby Idyllwild and had also always heard good things about Joshua Tree National Park. As a result, when we were planning our first post-retirement “wintering,” Palm S

When we were traveling on the east coast last year, I was obsessed with the wacky wild variety of mushrooms we found. Now that we are in a much dryer area with little shade, we are seeing no mushrooms, but here I am obsessed with the desert flowers.   As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve found that we like the desert landscapes a lot, but now that it is spring, a beautiful array of flowers have popped up making them even nicer. I think I am particularly fascinated by the flowers

AI’s approximation of our route from end of March 2025 to end of March, 2026. This week marks the anniversary of selling our home in LA, getting rid of most of our stuff and launching the Great American Road Trip (GART) . I wrote a little bit about this in the 1 year retirement anniversary post last summer, but we kind of really like having very little stuff. We’re still finding that to be true now that we’ve spent a full year as homeless nomads, although occasionally it ca