Kirksville to California: A Holiday Special
We have been having a blast getting in the festive spirit down in Arizona! It has been a great lead up to our Christmas trip to Missouri to celebrate with Amity’s family. After all that midwestern excitement, we followed our adventurous spirit into a zone where the Mojave Desert meets the Colorado Desert in California to spend New Year’s Eve exploring Joshua Tree National Park. Things couldn’t be more different, but the main factor that brings them all together is that we had a blast doing it!
Mile: 26,566
Quote of the Blog: “Any new beginning is forged from the shards of the past, not from the abandonment of the past".” - Craig D. Lounsbrough
Song of the Blog: Mojave Desert - Leviro
For the second year in a row, we spent our Christmas weekend in Kirksville, Missouri. This is technically our legal home, and we always have some great laughs and enjoy our time spent with Amity’s family there. Our flights there were a little funny this year. We found that it would be much less for me to fly out on Thursday night with Frontier, while Amity waited to fly out Friday morning with Southwest. I was only able to bring a small bag on the plane, so I had to make sure I had at least one set of extra cloths and my Nintendo Switch in there to keep me sane on the flight. Amity was able to fly with everything else. This actually went way smoother than I expected it to go. Win for us.
We spent the first day at the Early household. This always equates to tons of time playing with Baylor, Atticus and Finley. While momentarily catching Briley as she comes and goes from their house. Amity enjoyed spending some time with her sister and the kids. The next morning we headed out for Kirksville. Our GPS in the rental car took us a random direction Amity has never drove before, which is saying something. It was smooth sailing and fun to see other parts of the areas I haven’t been to before. We split our time between Amity’s mom’s house and her dad’s house. It’s always a good time full of laughs around them. Especially with the holidays around.
Christmas in Kirksville are a marathon run. There are three days and nights of events and get togethers with pit stops at Woody’s for day beers with Mike. It comes and goes faster than anyone ever plans for. We started out marathon off with Christmas Eve at Uncle Rick and Lisa’s house. This is highlighted with a quality game of family dice. Unfortunately, I did not return as champion like last year, and the kids ended up taking all of my money. Amity didn’t fair too well either. Still a great time! Amity spent the later portion of the night going to midnight mass with her sister’s family. The next morning is Christmas at Mike and Karen’s house. We had all the kids and parents and siblings there for a few hours of holiday fun; or chaos pending on your perspective. We continued the marathon the next morning with a Christmas breakfast before we celebrated at Julie and Jeff’s house. By this point, everyone was a little whipped out. We made it through gifts without anyone falling asleep! About 10 minutes after we were done people started dropping like flies. It’s amazing to see how much some of these people do in such a short span of time. We finished the celebrations with a festive dinner with everyone there. As fast as it all came to be, it seemed to end even faster.
Luckily for our flight home, we got to fly together on the same plane! This trip was direct flights both ways, which we haven’t had before. It is going to be hard to go back to having layover to fly anywhere. So nice to get on the flight and land at your destination! We didn’t get back into Phoenix until after 1am. Good thing is, the drive back to our house from the airport is really simple and fast. We were able to rally in the morning and get through out work week. When we got back, we started thinking about what we wanted to do for New Years. We initially wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, but pricing and logistics just didn’t match up. So, we opted to take on another adventure we wanted to do while down here, which was going to explore Joshua Tree National Park outside of Palm Springs, California.
We decided to get into stay in the Palm Desert area, and then explore into Joshua Tree and Palm Springs. We pulled into the hotel the day before New Years Eve. We explored the downtown area of Palm Desert and found a nice restaurant called Kitchen 86 on El Paseo Street. It was a nice little restaurant in a vibrant area of town. We ended the night with a night cap drink at The Little Bar. Palm Desert is much quieter than I expected, but after seeing all the 55+ communities around there, it all makes sense.
The next morning we made our way up to the north entrance of Joshua Tree National Park. This area is very unique. It is very mountainous, but the mountains are very baren minus your occasional cactus and Joshua Tree. We drove past the Sant to Snow National Monument, which was actually snowcapped, and crazy to see. Pulling into Joshua Tree it seems like you are driving into nothing. As you get closer and closer to some of the hikes, the rocks jet out of the ground and start to stack on top of each other like someone had placed them there.
We started out first hike with checking out Skull Rock. We planned to do the skull rock trail, which we thought we had found. We walked around for quite a while before deciding to head back to the car. While exploring we found small slot canyons, caves, arches and cliffs littered with an assortment of cacti and Joshua Trees. It felt like we were walking around on the surface of another planet with these crazy looking trees that look like gnarly cacti, known as Joshua Trees. When we got back to the car, we realized we had not been on the Skull Rock trail at all, and had just been wandering around the desert. I personally think out trail was radical! We shipped off to the next spot, which was Heart Rock and Arch Rock. After having a little lunch break at the car and spotting a Coyote running by, we started hiking out towards what we thought was the trail. We eventually learned that we had just been dumb and followed other dumb people who didn’t know where the trail was (because in Joshua Tree National Park, there are no ways to tell what is and isn’t a trial because you can just walk and go anywhere. We still found some really cool stuff! But we quickly realized we were not in the right place. The trail was actually on the other side of the road and quite clearly marked. This was very much an Instagram influenced kind of trail! People were walking out on it in the most ridiculous outfits. We made sure to get our pictures at Heart Rock, but when we got to Arch Rock Amity was quite happy with just looking at it and leaving.
We kept on with our adventure of the park. We now knew that when we stopped for a place, we would need to first off actively look for the trail sign and trailhead, and not just follow people because they are walking out towards something. Our next stop was at the Cholla Cactus Garden. On the way, I had to turn the car around, because I spotted what looked like a melon growing on the ground. Low and behold, we found was is known as a Coyote Melon, which grows naturally. Pretty simple, yet when you think about it, really cool!
It is crazy to be out in the desert and have so much nothing, and then in small little oasis you have all of this growth happening. This one was all a bunch of gnarly looking cacti! It was a little less inviting than most would imagine a Desert Oasis to be like. Still really cool! We ended our adventures of the park at the Cottonwood Springs Oasis. This was amazing! The Palm Trees growing here were crazy!! They were massive and all bunched up together along this small ravine in the desert. We spent a little bit of time chilling and taking in this spot. It was really beautiful to see. This was a great little adventure into Joshua Tree National Park. We would go back here to do some camping and star gazing, but I think we accomplished all of the real designated hikes we wanted to do.
For New Year’s Eve we went into Palm Springs for dinner and entertainment. We had some great pointers from friends on where to go, what to eat and things to do while we were there. We did our best to check them all off. We got dinner at this amazing Mexican Restaurant called, Tac/Quia. This place has margarita sampler flights, and some of the best Mexican food we have had since we were in Baja, MX for our honeymoon. We opted to do a little walk around Palm Spring and headed back to our hotel for an early night. We are no longer the night owls of the past, it was a very long day of exploring in Joshua Tree National Park and nowhere in Palm Springs had anything really worth us staying up late for. So we brought in the new year a little early this year (East Coast Time!).
The plan for New Year’s Day was to explore the Palm Springs area a little more. This town has been capsulated in the 1970’s and architecturally has not left! This makes for a very unique and quirky town! We made sure to see the massive Marilyn Monroe statue, some really funny stores, some cool art and everything else downtown Palm Spring, California (or in the words of Mike Sparks, Downtown California). To wrap up our time in Cali, we stopped at the La Quinta Brewing Company for a beer and some lunch. It was a really nice spot, with good beer and the food was on point too.
We made quick work of our drive back to Buckeye. We had to start coming up with some plans tough, because I am definitely sick, Amity is starting to feel sick and we had a half marathon to run in 5 days. This might be a rough week ahead, but we defiantly ended 2023 in full Live Rad & Travel fashion!!! Here is to all that is to come in 2024! May our adventures take us to places we haven’t even thought of yet!