Month: November 2008

Back in Boulder!

Only two states today – Utah and Colorado.

We had a nice breakfast at the Comfort Inn we stayed at in Richfield UT. Got started nearly on time and made good time across Utah. The scenery gradually changed from Moab style to what we are used to in western CO. We were delayed for lunch by a bad accident on I-70 near Parachute CO, but we had a nice lunch and good conversation with Shirley in Glenwood Springs CO. We had another (short) delay by and accident on Highway 6 but recovered quickly and made it home about 6:30pm. There was snow on Vail Pass and near the tunnel and it snowed on use while we got gas in Silverthorne so we felt we were back. Yesterday I wore shorts and a short sleeved shirt. Today I had on jeans and a long sleeved shirt. What a difference a day and 600 miles make!

Hope you have enjoyed our pictures and these journals. We had a great road trip but are glad to be home.

This was our last day in CA. We got up at 5:30, packed, ate breakfast, loaded and were off by 7:30am. We were really glad to have Jezebelle (our Garmin GPS) help us get out of San Diego during the morning rush hour. We didn’t realize we would be in 4 states today California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. Janet tried to capture the scenery as we zipped through up and over and around. We had lunch just a few miles inside Nevada. We thought we were stopping at a Nevada information booth (hoping there would be a park there) but we didn’t find anything so we ended up parking in the shade of a tree in a casino parking lot for our lunch. We had good weather and the trip was uneventful. We plan to leave Richfield UT tomorrow and stop in Glenwood Springs CO and have lunch with Shirley T who will meet us there, and then head on over to Boulder by late afternoon.

We had breakfast this morning at the cafe on the fishing pier. There were lots of photo opportunities. Afterwards we walked the beach again north to Dog beach. There were lots more people on the beach today because it was warmer. Janet did some shopping in some of the nearby boutiques and found some wonderful items. We had a late lunch at the Third Street restaurant after some more walking and spent some more time on the beach. Because of the late lunch we had a light dinner at the Vine. We are prepacking tonight and plan to leave early tomorrow. We plan to stay in Richfield UT tomorrow night.

Today we took our morning walk to the north and got all the way to Dog Beach. is a dog park on the beach. Dogs are not allowed on other parts of the beach, but they are allowed without leashes in Dog Park. The dogs really looked like they were having a lot of fun. We took lots of pictures for Twiz and Kuli. After our walk we drove to the Gaslight Historical District. We walked around the district a bit and found a shopping center that reminded us of the Tivoli in Denver. We enjoyed lunch at the Napa Valley Grille and looked at some of the stores. Instead of reading on the beach we spent part of the afternoon reading on the balcony of our room. It has a great view of the beach and the Ocean Beach pier. We have one more full day in Ocean Beach and then head back to CO on Friday. This evening we enjoyed the OB Farmers Market. They close down two long blocks of the main street and had a great variety of booths with food, produce, crafts and flowers. Janet found a bolle scarf that she liked and we enjoyed blinis and quesadilla and some corn on the cob.

Today we explored the beach and the town by walking first south beyond the pier. The sand beach disappears the ground rises and there are rocks and cliffs. The houses are packed in to have a view and in some places the path along the shore has been washed away. We had a picnic lunch on the beach and enjoyed some beachwalking north and some reading time on the beach. We took a short trip to a nearby shopping center with a camera store so I could get a battery charger for my camera. I had packed the wrong charger for my camera. It had rained in the morning, but by the time we walked it was sunny. We enjoyed the sun all afternoon. We got back to the hotel in time to enjoy the sunset. Then we got takeout food from a nearby restaurant to take back to the room to watch the election returns. I was prepared for the final results to go late into the night so I was pleasantly surprised when it was all over at a reasonable time (for people on the west coast). We felt we were seeing history in the making.

We had a leisurely breakfast at the restaurant by our motel before we left Holbrook AZ this morning. We got away about 8::00am (we forgot that that part of AZ doesn’t use Daylight savings time so we never got to change our clocks today).

We were amazed at the varied scenery as we traveled across AZ and the dropped south to just north of Phoenix and then west on I-10 and then dropped south again on state highway 85 to I-8 and then west to Yuma and on into San Diego. We saw flat lands, mountains, desert, forests, all kinds of rock formations cactus, and finally the ocean. We went up and down numerous times and seemed to oscillate between sea level and 4000 feet. We had lunch in a little desert town in AZ at the intersection of 85 and I-8. We were stopped by the border patrol checkpoints several times (since we were very near the Mexico border much of the time) and were stopped for plant and produce inspection at the entrance to CA. We were busted for having illegal Whole Foods apples which they kept and said they were going to cut up and look for worms. We got some great pictures but haven’t uploaded them yet. Hope to soon.

We are staying Ocean Beach at the Ocean Beach Hotel in San Diego. We are right across the street from the beach. We had a nice dinner nearby, watched the two presidential candidates at the half-time of Monday Night Football and then did a little grocery shopping.

Will be doing some more exploring and beach walking tomorrow.

We had a good first day on our road trip. We had planned to start about 6:00am but didn’t get away until about 6:40am. We are taking the southern route which is a little longer but is different scenery. We had lunch at a roadside rest area about an hours drive from Santa Fe and got into Holbrook, AZ where we are staying tonight about 5:20pm, so we made good time.

We saw lots of trains and trucks along the way. One National Guard convoy near Albuquerque.

Tomorrow we should get to our motel in San Diego late afternoon. The Fall colors were very visible along all the river valleys. Full leaves were still on many of the trees.

Pictures are on www.flickr.com/photos/jswitzer