Recently, in moving back to California from Florida, we took a road trip across the country on Highway 10! It was a 41 hour drive, with many stops along the way. I can’t say I’d recommend it as a trip to do for fun, as it wasn’t very scenic, but if you need to get from one side of the country to the other, why not stop and see some sights?
Our first stop was at Crayola Experience, in Orlando, which is great if you have a creative kid. They can draw something and it moves around on the giant screen with other people’s drawings on the themed background!
The best stops on the trip were in Florida, at the natural springs. What a joy. We swam at Rainbow Springs, which has a huge pool of crystal clear water. On weekends, you see a little too many obese people from Georgia and Alabama at the springs.
Another highlight was a stop for lunch at Reggae Shack in Gainesville. Oh what bliss…the curried palm hearts. The vibe there is also very cool, with college students, and brightly painted walls. We went to Harn Museum of Art, since it was way too hot outside to do anything outdoors. And we stopped at the Stephen Foster Cultural Center. I highly recommend a stop here, as the dioramas are magical, as is the gorgeous historical building. It was our second visit and just as wonderful as the first.
A glorious morning was spent at Madison Blue Spring. What a paradise! Here a natural spring gushes out into a river, and in the middle is a shallow beach-like spot with crystal clear water. We played here for hours, letting the flow from the spring push us along on an inflatable alligator! The greenery all around is stunning. I will never forget this day. And I’ll be back!
In Pensacola, we found a fast casual restaurant that we really enjoyed, Voodoo’s BBQ. The ceiling and decor are lovely, and the food is delicious too! It feels like you’re in New Orleans, which is only three hours away. I love fast casual restaurants on road trips, because you don’t want to be sitting any longer than you need to after all that driving. It’s great to just pay at the counter and leave as soon as you want.
This amazing day ended with another idyllic experience, sunset at Pensacola Beach. What perfect white sand with sea oats bobbing in the breeze and people playing ball or looking out to sea. This day made it hard to leave Florida for sure!
We stopped in Mobile, Alabama, to check out Fort Conde, a history museum housed in a replica of a fort. It was a great little museum. Our daughter also enjoyed a few hours at the children’s museum in New Orleans. At night we went to City Park to enjoy a thunder storm from under the huge pavilion, and then to walk among the giant oak trees strung with moss. I love City Park. This was my third time visiting New Orleans and I’ll be back for sure, just because of City Park.
Baton Rouge has a very magical little stop, at the Old State Capitol. Don’t miss this one! Here you can view a ghost movie, which you must do. It was so well done, and short enough to be pure enjoyment (about 15 minutes). My daughter loved it so much, and all of us did. It’s not very scary but it is something you won’t find anywhere else! The Old State Capitol is such a beautiful building from the outside, and inside. It is amazing to walk around and look up at the stained glass ceiling, and to admire the architectural details all around you. There aren’t many nice places to eat in Baton Rouge, so we were happy to find a European patisserie.
Lafayette was a cute little spot to visit. The main street has trees that reminded me of towns in Northern California, like Santa Rosa. Here you can sit with students of University of Louisiana and have a cup of coffee at Reve Coffee Roasters. It is a great experience! What a beautiful building, and what a cool vibe. Children’s Museum of Acadiana did the trick for my daughter. And Artmosphere was a hip little place to eat dinner (it has live music too sometimes).
Once we left Louisiana we were in for some terrible places for a few days. Texas is awful! Beaumont was a yucky stop for lunch at ripoff Katherine & Co. Houston’s main park, Hermann Park, was not very impressive, but it was ok for a walk. The Houston Museum of Natural Science is truly amazing, though. The huge fossils are incredible, like nothing you’ve seen. The gems, and the dinosaur skeletons, are wonderful. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston is also incredible, especially the pre-Columbian gold necklaces and other creations from Colombia and Peru. These were collected by Glassell, along with gold items from all over the world. The art museum also has a nice cafe, though it is expensive. The Children’s Museum of Houston was fun for my daughter but very loud and cold and quite terrible for parents…misery setting in, to be cemented by traffic in Houston and more days in Texas…
River Walk in San Antonio is a truly beautiful spot. Here, you walk along the river, below street level, and there are tropical trees like none you’ve seen before. The beauty of the spot is, however, ruined by hoards of tourists, tacky eateries, and whiffs of urine. We actually enjoyed ourselves more the next morning at a cute little bakery, Bakery Lorraine, in the hip new Pearl District. Huge windows looking out on historical industrial buildings (pretty nonetheless) and chic decor make this a super spot to hang out! It was my birthday so I was treated extra special! The bakery was followed by a glorious walk in the sunken Japanese Tea Garden in San Antonio. Don’t miss this spot! It is just wonderful with its terraced walkways, water features, and flowers. And it’s free!
My birthday dinner was unfortunately spent in Fort Stockton, a truly desolate place. Here the only “fun” thing to do is walk around the Walmart. It amazed me how many people live in Texas. It is dry, dusty, dirty, and almost nothing has been planted or created to spice up the atmosphere. We did however find a fairly nice Mexican restaurant where we ate authentic (read: bland) Mexican food. Since there was absolutely nothing to do in Fort Stockton I was able to catch up on hours of work on my tiny laptop.
We tried to go for our last spring swim at Balmorhea Springs. Here you can’t believe there’d ever be a place to swim because it’s so desolate, parched, and miserable. But the springs, from a distant glance, looked like they could be ok. We didn’t stop though, as every poor soul from miles around had gathered early on Saturday morning to line up for a swim. Advice: come on a weekday!
On the way to El Paso we stopped at an adorable white church called La Purisima-Socorro Mission, which had a cute (though very dry) grotto outside with a tree and three statues. It was in a very dry neighborhood.
Next we hit El Paso. This town has high impressive mountains but still manages to be extremely ugly. Nothing has been done to beautify the town. In Tucson and Phoenix even the freeway walls have been beautified, and there are cute things everywhere. Not so in El Paso. We did manage to find a new people-friendly spot to hang out, Fountains at Farah, part of Cielo Vista Mall, that was attractive. We ended up spending quite a bit of time there, at La Madeleine Bakery, catching up with an old friend we knew in Santa Barbara. This was super! We visited the National Border Patrol Museum, which had interesting contraptions used to try to sneak into America, and the El Paso Museum of Archaeology, a small but nice museum. These are next door to each other with a pretty cactus garden in between.
A horrible experience was the Wyler Aerial Tramway, run by the Texas Parks and Wildlife. First we waited in no shade in incredible heat to board the tramway, for about half an hour. Then we got to the top and I stood out looking at the miserable view. I was surprised when I looked around and saw my husband already standing in line to go back down. When I went to ask him why he wasn’t enjoying the lookout, he said there were signs everywhere by the FCC saying that there were higher than humanly tolerated levels of electromagnetic fields, as we were standing directly underneath a cell or radio tower. What on earth? So we were stuck in a higher than allowed for humans electric field for half an hour while we waited to go back down. I was disgusted and angered by this. How could Texas Parks and Wildlife allow this? Either have the tower or have the tramway, but don’t have both.
We did a long drive to Tucson, absolutely worth it because we were getting out of Texas. In New Mexico, we stopped at an adorable little square called Old Mesilla Village in Las Cruces. Just an hour out of Texas and already things had improved, with pretty architecture and plants all around us. We sat at a cute little cafe, attached to a hotel, and enjoyed their fountains, tile work, and cactus garden. The desert looked very beautiful in Arizona, quite green with all the cactus plants covering the entire desert. The Pima Air and Space Museum was super fun- kids can climb inside the cockpit of helicopters and planes, direct traffic in an air traffic control tower, and check out a colorful collection of patches collected by a little boy during World War II. We had dinner in Tucson at a groovy fast casual Italian restaurant, called Sauce. And then we watched a desert thunderstorm from our hotel window. It was too hot to be outside for long, though we were able to take a little walk from our hotel to the restaurant, the first time in quite a few days that the heat was tolerable enough for that.
Arizona was a blast from the past, as we lived there in 2005 for nine months. We walked around the Tucson Botanical Gardens– the morning was coolish and lovely- and taught our daughter about the plants of Arizona. We had planned a special treat in Carefree, a casitas rather than a hotel room, which, during the summer, costs the same as a hotel room on other towns that are not scorching hot! The casitas was lovely in every way, with sinks tiled in a Spanish design, thick chunky walls, doors carved with roses, and a Spanish fireplace. We walked around the adorable town of Carefree checking out the fountain, Gila monster slide and playground, and gardens. El Pedregal, an African marketplace that I remembered fondly, was a ghost town, which I think I remember was pretty usual in summer. The boulders all around were stunning and I took as many photos as I wanted, something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I got my awesome Canon camera 6 years ago. It was so fun to be back in Arizona!
We drove around our old town, Anthem. What a silly place, with mostly just houses and houses and more houses. We could hardly believe that we’d bought in such a boring place, 11 years ago. But once we arrived in CA, looked at for sale houses and rentals, and experienced the horrific housing market, we thoroughly understood our 11-years-ago selves. We went to the super playground in Anthem and walked around in the scorching nighttime heat. “What were we thinking?” we kept saying.
We had a long drive to CA the next day. Though hungry, we avoided a stop in Blythe, because of memories from 2005 of the yuckiest McDonalds we’ve ever been to. I couldn’t bear the thought of another roadside McDonalds, as many of the towns where we stopped for lunch offered nothing but this as an option. These usually came with flies buzzing around your food and locals giving you odd stares. We were rewarded by this decision! We ate at a great place in Rancho Mirage, a fast casual pizza place with huge salads. Our daughter enjoyed the fantastic Children’s Discovery Museum in Rancho Mirage, flipping her own imaginary pizza in the “cafe” for hours.
Even though Redlands is probably not the nicest place in CA, it looked beautiful! CA again!!! The flowers! The California palms! The eucalyptus! It all looked and smelled familiar.
The next day we treated ourselves to a stop that we always used to stop at! Corner Bakery at Calabasas Commons. This is a great place to stop on the way to LAX if you live in Santa Barbara. It was a lovely familiar place to be. We ate the yummy food and then walked down the little path past hundreds of roses. Then we walked along in front of the stores to admire the sculptures on the other side of the complex. It was fun to show our daughter California, as she didn’t remember much of it.
We didn’t have time to stop in our hometown of Santa Barbara, as we headed to San Luis Obispo to our first appointment looking for a place to rent or buy. We chose San Luis Obispo, as we thought it would be cheaper than Santa Barbara. This day that we arrived in SLO was three weeks ago! Guess what? We couldn’t find a place to buy or to rent in SLO. It’s NOT cheaper than Santa Barbara. And on top of that, the inventory is so low that there is a huge folder stuffed with applications at the rental office for every apartment or house that becomes available. The happiest thing of all was that we gave up on SLO (which, although it has an awesome main street, was looking kind of industrial with lots of plain yellow hills to me) and decided to live in Santa Barbara, the town that we love! Luckily, this happened because my parents visited and we all met up for a reunion with my sister’s family in SB. That day we looked at some rentals for the heck of it to see if there was a better selection than in SLO, and that day we decided SB was the way to go.
That was nine days ago, and it took lots of truly awful rollercoaster emotions (including what looked like a great rental, desperately waiting to be accepted for it, being accepted, celebrating, signing the lease, and then finding out it was run by a slumlord and none of the appliances worked) to get to where we are today, with a lease and our daughter in school. What took way longer and was way harder than expected…to find a rental…we have now achieved. It doesn’t have everything we needed, but we couldn’t wait any longer. Our daughter is in school on time, and now we can breath again. There will be a lot of driving in the next two weeks from our short-term rental (which has been a lifesaver) in Pismo to school in Santa Barbara, and I hope our belongings are ok, sitting there in pods at UHaul, but we have finally achieved our dream of moving back to CA.
When I go outside (any time of day that I want) and enjoy the cool air, I don’t know how I lived so long in AC unable to go outside and unable to feel any hint of coolness in the air for seven months each year. Florida is gorgeous- with its springs and white sand beaches- but CA has open windows, and that’s what makes my heart feel alive.