The Travel Monkeys

The Travel Monkeys hit the road again in February and headed south to explore more of what California has to offer. While Northern California was soaked in a couple solid weeks of heavy rain, we followed the sunshine down to the Southern parts of the state.  Some So Cal travel tips:

- Disneyland: Best Rides: Big Thunder Railroad, Space Mountain and the Indiana Jones Adventure. Also, they take a photo of you on the thrill rides and display it when you exit on a screen to try to sell it to you. Have your digital camera ready so you can take a photo of this photo, outsmarting Disney and preventing them from further emptying your pockets.

- San Diego: Skip Pacific Beach. The area was infested with completely drunk people at all hours of the day. (Hmmm . . . end of February . . . spring break perhaps?) The beach is nice, very long, and clean (great for running) but the restaurant options are very mediocre (i.e. Hooters).

The highlight of our Southern road trip is definitely Palm Springs and Indian Canyons, a desert oasis just outside of town. Palm Springs itself is nice and clean, filled with little restaurants and shops and fantastic little boutique hotels. We stayed at the Chase Hotel as well as the Peppertree. Both were lovely, clean, and reasonably priced. Our room in the Peppertree was a like a dark little cavern with pretty wood furniture and adobe walls. It was very dim but a good escape from the hot desert sun outside.

If you are in Palm Springs and you like wine, make sure to visit the little wine shop Wild for the Vine. They pour a wonderful and very generous tasting line up.

The real treasures out here in the middle of nowhere are the oases. If you have never seen a real desert oasis, please do so before you die. It is incredible. These are a completely natural phenomena where water appears in the desert and palms grow all around it. The habitat is so unique it even has non-desert life such as orchids and frogs.  These photos are from Indian Canyons.

The people at the picnic table give a sense of scale.

There is a wonderful silence and stillness here. All you can hear is the babble of the creek.

There are miles of hiking trails all around Palm Springs, through the oases. desert, and surrounding mountains. This is a surprisingly interesting destination that offers a lot to do.

One caveat: Palm Springs is very popular among retired folks. If you are not over 65, you may feel like you are crashing a retirement home event everywhere you go. You may also get looks as if you somehow snuck past some checkpoint out in the desert that was supposed to keep out anyone who doesn’t have grandchildren. Palm Springs is also quite gay-friendly, so if you can’t help but to exude that taboo quality of “youth” then you might feel more welcome in some of the gay-friendly shops and restaurants which tend to have a younger scene.

I realize us Travel Monkeys sort of fell off the radar since our arrival in California. I considered writing a blog entry on several occasions, but I decided against it because I was worried that our readers would not enjoy the content. I had this fear because many of you are in colder climates at the moment. There is probably rain and snow and your local forecasts use vocabulary such as “blustery” and “wintry mix”. I feared that reading our blog might stir up negative emotions, and I didn’t know how to write up what we’re doing without feeling like I’m gloating about the weather in California.

I have decided to go ahead and share some of what we’ve been up to these last few months, but with a warning:

Advisory: Do not read any further if you are prone to weather envy, leisure envy, or wine envy.

After settling in to our temporary home in Rancho Solano (a.k.a Rancho Relax-o) we decided it was time to start exploring what this area has to offer. We’ve both started running again, and John is training for a marathon in northern California in May. We’ve started to work on our tennis game, we swim (in January!) and have taken up mushroom hunting. Our birdwatching has gotten fairly eventful (as far as birdwatching goes). Close encounters include the Western Scrub Jay, Stellar Jay, Spotted Towhee, California Towhee, White Crowned Sparrow, Lazuli Bunting, Lesser Goldfinch, Black Pheobe, Killdeer, California Quail, White-tailed Kite, Broad-Winged Hawk (Rare on this coast), Great Egret, Golden Crowned Sparrow (migrates from Alaska), Anna’s Hummingbird (a resisdent in our backyard), Oregon Junco, Rock Wren, American Kestrel, Western Meadowlark, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Bushtit, Oak Titmouse, Chestnut-capped Chickadee, Wild Turkey, and our most delightful new sighting – the Peregrine Falcon.

We are also successfully growing garlic, kale, and spinach in our yard, after a small setback where I had to figure out what was eating the baby leaves. It turned out to be sparrows, and lucky for me they are extremely afraid of tinsel.

We’ve started to explore the surrounding area, starting with Napa. If over 300 wineries aren’t enough reason to visit Napa Valley, then perhaps the state parks will lure you in (with a little help from the 73 degree weather on January 15, 2009). The new year began with a 12 mile hike across the Palisades in Robert Louis Stevenson State Park. The trail was steep and challenging with occasional patches of mud and ice in the shady stretches.

If you’ve never hiked 12 miles, you should because it feels amazing. It is a great way to really appreciate a cup of tea, dinner, and your bed.

We also went camping (in January!) in Napa Valley State Park, which has a lovely “enchanted forest” ambiance. Here we spotted a California Slender Salamander, which is often mistaken for a worm.

Further northwest lies Sonoma County, which has even more hiking and wine to offer a wine-loving hiker. We stayed one night in Healdsburg at a great B&B called the Camellia Inn. The room was clean and cozy with a fireplace and couch. In the evening they served wine and cheese, and then later on there was chocolate port and brownies! The breakfast was creative and delicious – a baked crepe and some apple sausage. In Healdsburg we had dinner at Zin and we were fairly impressed. John had a hangar steak that was served in a big puddle of incredibly delicious sauce.

The next day we hiked to the top of Fitch Mountain, a lovely 3 hour hike where we didn’t see a single other person. Then we stopped for a tasting at one of our favorite wineries (Ridge) before heading home on the scenic 128 through Alexander Vallley.

Vineyards at Ridge Winery, Sonoma County

Mustard blooming in Alexander Valley

So far we have no complaints. (Although my elbow did hurt for a couple weeks, and I couldn’t figure out if it was from too much tennis, cooking, tea-sipping, or wine-opening. I decided it was a case of “leisure-itis” and iced it until it got better.)

The reality is that the weather is pretty incredible here, and that tends to make life even better. There are foggy, wet days, and even ones with rainstorms, but even those pass quickly and leave the world glistening and green.

January storm rainbows seen from our backyard.

Yesterday, on January 26, 2009, I saw this tree near our house. Its pink blooms declare that we have survived our first California winter.

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We stayed a couple nights in a small town called Springdale at the south end of Zion National Park. I was up at sunrise yesterday, and saw the full moon setting from our hotel parking lot:

Moonset-Sunrise in Springdale

Springdale has a small animal farm where you can see creatures you normally wouldn’t get too close to, like elk, buffalo, and long-horned bulls.

Elk making funny face.

The animals here don’t seem too happy although they have big piles of dry grass to eat. They prefer the fresh stuff, but have eaten it to the ground on their side of the fence. So here’s John giving an elk some of “the good stuff.” He also had the courage to feed the buffalo below!

Springdale and Zion Park have a free shuttle that take you all around the Zion Canyon part of the park. Our experience is that you’d get to see a lot more nature and less people if you had the courage to take a very long hike deep into the Park. You need a lot of experience to hike this land – it’s very hot and steep, you need heaps of water with you, and even some of the well-traveled paths have 800 foot drops and only 30 inches of trail! And if the cliffs aren’t scary enough, there are rattle snakes and mountain lions in Zion.

It’s hard to convey size of these cliffs in photographs. In the next couple photos I’ve included a stop sign and a person as reference objects.

This cliff is even taller than it looks here.

Can't see the person? They are inside the red circle!

There are some great rocks here. The one behind John below is probably about 40 feet high and sitting at a rather precarious angle.

Zion’s landscape includes both desert and water. Water from snow melt and storms far away ends up in the canyons. The Virgin River flows though here, and there are numerous waterfalls and hanging gardens.

Small Emeral Pool

Weeping Rock glistening in sun

The Virgin River - North America's fastest river