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

As part of our retirement planning, we needed to figure out what we wanted to do during the winter months. I do not like the cold. I’m one of those people who grew up in LA and always complained when the weather got “bad,” meaning below 60 degrees, days of rain, etc, etc. Although Craig is much more cold-tolerant than I am, our activity goals these days include so much outside time, that living in places with “normal” winters didn’t seem right for us. We also didn’t want to

Lost Dutchman State Park If you haven’t read it already, check out Part 1 about why we decided to “winter” in southern Arizona. I have to be honest, we did not like Phoenix nearly as much as Tucson. It was fine, we did lots of fun things, but we probably won’t be back for a long stay. We did really like the area we stayed in, Chandler. It was a nice residential area, about 15-20 minutes from the South Mountain Preserve , which had decent hiking trails (but wasn’t as pretty

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that we’ve been hiking a lot - it’s our primary form of exercise and also we just love it for the variety of hiking locations, the fresh air, the views, etc. Most of our hikes have been in the woods, by babbling brooks or other waterways. We were not sure what to expect from Southern Arizona - was it just going to be dry desert? Were we going to enjoy the scenery? Or was it just going to be barren? Short answer, we loved it. Tucso