One full year. 19 states. 30,960 miles. 15 national parks. 3 national memorials. 4 national monuments. 1 national recreation area. A few issues. A lot of favorite places. Some surprises. Game changers. What we miss and what we have planned. Our first edited video! Learning something new everyday!

Our journey north through California’s hills and mountains continues. Another favorite – Yosemite. Seeing old friends. Meeting new friends. A little bit of snow. A whole lot of beauty.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Taxes, high prices, and crazy traffic aside, California’s diverse landscapes are breathtaking. From desert and palm trees in the south to high elevations, towering trees, and snow in the north. Or cliff-lined shores in the west to plunging waterfalls in the east. California does not disappoint.

Dirt. Rock. Barren land. Palm trees. One can get over-saturated with the desert view after a while. Luckily for us, we were still in Palm Springs, California when Desert X started, and we were able to get some culture!

Desert X is an exhibition of thirteen art installations around Palm Springs, basically turning the area from Palm Desert to Sky Valley to downtown Palm Springs into an outdoor art museum. A free app is available to download that introduces each artist and the piece he/she created along with directions to its location. It is free with parking and easy access to each piece, although timed tickets are required from Thursdays through Sundays for many, if not all, of the exhibits. It runs from March 12 to May 16, 2021, with one of the installations not being available until the early part of April. We spent a day driving around to see some of them. For more information about the artists and their creations, click on the names or visit desertx.org.

When someone says they’ve patronized a desert bar in Arizona, you might think that isn’t a big deal since Arizona is mostly desert. In fact, you might be envisioning driving down a regular, paved two- or four-lane road, seeing a brightly-lit neon sign that reads BAR with an arrow pointing to a run-down hole-in-the-wall on the side of the road surrounded by barren landscape with scraggly brush and a few cacti.