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.

If you’re thinking of moving to Florida, here are some pros and cons to help with your decision!
Pros:
-The beaches are beautiful with clear water and shells along the shore.
– The air and water are warm at the beach making for a great beach day!
-The people are generally happy and nice. (There are a few spots where you find entitled people, such as Worth Ave in Palm Beach, Boca Raton, and Naples).
– The housing is cheap, new, and beautiful.
– It rains lovely big raindrops often which clears the air. The thunderstorms are also cool.
– The water is soft which means your clothes and dishes come out clean.
– The natural springs are absolutely magical and unique. You can swim in them in summer under the shade of the thick tropical foliage.
– The turnpike is a toll road that is very well maintained and leads to Orlando. There are clean service plazas all along it where you can get gas or food without having to enter a town.
– Florida tends to spend a lot of money on nice facilities like modern libraries and beautiful nature centers with tropical tanks.
– You can spend almost the entire year in shorts and slippers because it’s so warm.
– You get plenty of sunshine, no haze or fog, and a nice tan and highlights in your hair from the sun. The days are almost never gloomy, depressing, or overcast. Life in technicolor!
– There is in general not much pollution in the air in the cities.
– There are many airports so it’s generally easy to travel from here, and there are good highways for roadtrips to the south.
– There is absolutely tons to do, including beaches, parks, theme parks, and museums. You won’t run out of things to do!
Cons:
– It is extremely hot and humid. Just when you think you can’t take it anymore the humidity kicks up a notch in August and lasts until December. It’s so hot that I got itchy heat rash (Apr-Dec) while picking up my child from school.
– You have to live in air-conditioning around the clock from April to December. If air-conditioning dries out your mouth or eyes or wakes you up when it clicks on and off then you won’t like Florida. In fact you will be exhausted and all dried out! If you find a north-facing apartment with no south-facing exterior walls (another apartment behind you), you will fare better. Curved Spanish tiles or silver metal roofs are also better. Avoid flat slab roofs.
– There are mosquitoes galore making it impossible to go outside at dusk or hike in the forest or visit gardens except from January-March. If you get bit by mosquitoes and don’t like to use pesticide on your skin, you will be restricted.
– They aerial spray mosquito spray over the neighborhoods. If you don’t like to be exposed to toxins you won’t like this. There are cancer hospital and children’s cancer hospital billboards everywhere, which makes you wonder.
– They spray an incredible amount of pesticide and herbicide in the landscaping because weeds and bugs thrive in the damp hot climate.
– There are biting ants which bite you whenever you stand still at a park or try to have a picnic. These bites are intensely itchy, more so than mosquito bites and last for weeks.
– There are giant man-of-war that sting at the beaches in winter if the wind is onshore.
– Hundreds of sharks migrate past the southeast beaches in winter. If you stand on the pier you can sometimes see them. This makes swimming a little dicey. There are also barracudas, puffer fish, sea urchins, and sting rays, so you have to be alert while swimming.
– From May-October there is vitrio virus in water that has any brackish element, so don’t swim if a river ends at the beach or in a lagoon. My friend’s baby got this on his nose. It can be life threatening or lead to amputations.
– Pools get too hot in summer to enjoy. Also the chlorine doesn’t work well in the heat, leading to ear infections.
– At dusk or when it’s overcast no-see-ums bite you at the beach. You can’t tell you’re being bitten until after it’s too late.
– There are freeways but they aren’t through the town. To get anywhere locally you must sit through traffic light after traffic light, and for some reason they set the lights for very long intervals in Florida. This makes for much road rage. It also makes it frustrating to go on outings.
– There are so many retired people from the northeast and midwest that there are way more elderly people than the usual demographics. This sometimes, especially in winter, makes you feel like you’re living in a retirement home.
– During the “season” in winter it is very crowded everywhere.
– A combination of elderly drivers going extremely slow and road rage people going fast, makes for scary and dangerous driving. Also, the DMV driving test here is insufficient (it is in a parking lot) so you see all kinds of terribly unsafe driving and must be on the alert at all times, especially during the season and spring break.
– The schools have a strange anti-recess stance so your child might not get to go outside. Also, they push kids beyond the abilities of their age, which leads to burn-out and overall misery for the whole family. They also don’t allow parents to enter the school unless volunteering so you feel like you have no idea where you are sending your child. The schools are also very large, with around 800 students. Also, instead of parents parking and walking to pick up their kids, most form an incredibly long and polluting car line.
– The charter schools here are just money-making enterprises. They are too large and just the same as the regular schools with car lines and standardized testing galore. Some don’t even have windows in the classrooms. They are not alternative in any way, and don’t allow kids who think outside the box to thrive nor allow kids to play more.

Pros:

• There are some fun foods to try because of the cultural influences in Florida: empanadas in Miami, lechon asado with plantains from Cuba, New York pizza, and Jewish matzo ball soup.
• There are people from all over the world including South America and Europe, so it’s easy to meet warm-hearted, open-minded, well-traveled friends.
• The blue-green water at the beach, inlets, intracoastal, and springs is truly spectacular and the tropical landscaping makes it very pretty.
• You can exercise outside pretty much every day as long as you time it well for mosquitoes and heat (8am, April-Dec) because there is no snow and it rarely drizzles, just rains for a short duration.
• The grocery stores, Publix, are clean and beautiful, and they carry many international items such as chocolate from England and guava paste.
• There is some European influence, such as quite a few French cafes, and a small few are authentic with good baguettes and pain au chocolat (Paris Bakery and Cafe in West Palm Beach is an example).

Cons:

• Smoking is allowed at parks, the beach, and outside at restaurants and coffee shops, and there are plenty of smokers. This can really ruin your experience just when you’ve settled down in a nice spot.
• There aren’t very many groovy/hippie/alternative people to see.
• Besides in hip areas like downtown Orlando, West Palm Beach, or Coral Gables, there aren’t many alternative coffee shops. You’re pretty much stuck with Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts (think: Cysteine), and Panera Bread.
• It’s flat! Your heart will do a little somersault of glee when you leave the state for a trip and see a hill or mountain.

More considerations, things that can’t be generalized about:

• There are quite a few gated communities or neighborhoods with no sidewalks. This doesn’t encourage exercise! However, there are some fantastic communities that have plenty of sidewalks and great walking.
• Some areas are more cosmopolitan than others. Palm Beach Gardens, Jupiter, Delray, and Miami are fairly upmarket. Other areas like St. Augustine, the Panhandle, and small town areas like De Leon Springs have their fair share of overweight and unattractive people.
• If you’ve lived in extremely cold weather all your life and are used to being restricted to the indoors by the weather, Florida is less of an adjustment. Peeling sweat-drenched clothes off your body after going for a walk seems like a luxury after shoveling snow most of your life. The happiest people in Florida are the snowbirds who only stay for three months, and second happiest are the people from brutally cold places.

I had a wonderful time in Hawaii last week, and updated many of the lotsafunmaps entries! Things change all the time! I also added some great places that I’ve wanted to add for a while, including St Louis Heights, where Cook pines grow at the top of a mountain overlooking Manoa Valley.

The first thing I did when I arrived on Oahu was swim at Eternity Beach. This is a tradition! This time the waves were wild and I had to be quite brave to jump in! Next my son and I had a nice day exploring Aloha Tower Marketplace, which is no longer a marketplace- only the tower remains plus Gordon Biersch Brewery. Where the shops used to be there are now classrooms for the third campus of Hawaii Pacific University. Going to the top of the tower affords great views in all directions, and we really enjoyed this.

Magic Island had no photos on lotsafunmaps yet, so my son and I went there- I had forgotten how lovely it is on the huge lawn under giant trees. It was so lovely to sit on a bench with my son and look out at Diamond Head and the waves in the surf lineup called Bowls.

I went alone to another spot that didn’t have an entry yet, Kawaikui Beach Park. I had always thought this was an unimpressive little square of lawn next to the main road, but around the corner is a gorgeous view of Koko Head and Koko Crater. I sat there for about half and hour and didn’t want to leave!

Dinner was at The Shack, on the water in Hawaii Kai– nothing feels more tropical than sitting by the tiki torches and feeling the breeze in your hair! It was fun to say hi to my parent’s friends.

My mom and I went to Doris Duke Beach and I swam. The funny thing is that I had this on my list of things I wanted to do, and I also had “end of Kalumanu Place” on my list. I had read about this in the new book Barbarian Days: A Surfer’s Life. The author, William Finnegan, lived at the end of Kalumanu Place as a teen and I wanted to go see it. Well, it is the same place as Doris Duke Beach! So I killed two birds with one stone, simply by coincidence! This time, high tide hid the pool where I swam two years before, so I had a wilder though wonderful swim!

My mom, dad, son and I had a picnic from Olive Tree Cafe, under the palm trees at Waialae Beach Park, followed by a rainy walk at Kahala Beach Resort– paradise!

Another swim was in order, so my son and I went to Royal Hawaiian Beach. We got a bit lost and ended up in not quite as nice a spot to swim, but afterward saw the resort from a side garden, a lovely view we’d never encountered before! We picked up some surf clothes, and some gifts from one of the zillions of ABC stores along Kalakaua Ave. Also at an ABC store, we bought triangle musubis with salmon, and pineapple pieces, and ate them on the lawn by the Duke Kahanamoku statue. It was a magical day.

My mom, dad, son and I had a burrito from Cha Cha Chas, enjoyed in a little hidden spot at Makapuu Beach. The wind was cool, and the view perfect. My son bodysurfed and it was fun to watch him.

I went alone to visit Kapiolani Community College farmers market, for a new entry! It is a heaven of fruits, flowers, plants, coconut drinks, and hot food. What a popular spot, with many tourists from Japan! Beside the stalls is a world-class cactus garden that is inspiring to explore.

The North Shore is a must-do when visiting Oahu. Mom, Dad, my son and I drove up there and had another wild swim at Three Tables Beach. It was invigorating and fun, and there were purple orchids floating in the water, leftover from a wedding. We walked to Shark’s Cove which was more crowded than I’ve seen before, and I took photos for lotsafunmaps from new angles. Dinner was a mahi mahi sandwich at Kuaaina Burger in Haleiwa town, what I’d been dreaming of for two years!

Bale French-Vietnamese cafe was another eatery on my list of favorite places to return to, and we all bought sandwiches there for the picnic at St Louis Heights. Later we watched a movie at Koko Marina.

No one could keep my pace by the end of the trip, so I went on a swim alone at Hau Tree Beach, where it’s shady in the morning, even in the water! You really start to need a break from the sun by the end of your trip. A lovely last outing was a hike at Hawaii Loa Ridge with my mom and brother- what a gorgeous spot with views way high up over Hawaii Kai. See the ocean, Koko Head, and the valleys below. The wind is cool and delightful. We had a fantastic night dancing and tapping to the beat of live music at Hard Rock Cafe in Waikiki where my brother played an amazing gig. What a venue! I’m lucky that I got to see him play.

It was special to spend such lovely times visiting my family. And a lot of fun to update lotsafunmaps too!

Ron just made a new screensaver! It works better with the new windows versions, and it has larger font, making the location names easier to read. Also it has a description of each photo below the photo. And it works if you have more than one monitor. Try it out! You will love it! http://www.lotsafunmaps.com/download.php

Just finished the 1000th entry of lotsafunmaps! This month is 9 years since we started the website. I’m glad my 1000th entry happens to be about live music: Frenchmen Street in New Orleans!