Road Trip (Palm Springs to Minneapolis-St. Paul)

Retirement trip number two. Home for less than 24 hours from Door County, Wisconsin, and hopped on a plane to fly to Palm Springs, California.

Friend Dave had spent the month of January (snowbird) in warm, sunny Palm Springs. He asked if I would join him on a road trip back to Minnesota.

From cold to desert to cold in a week!

Spent a day in Palm Springs hiking. Dave had been doing a lot of adventuring and shared some of his favorite treks with me. We did three hikes in one day!

We did not plan a definite route or timeframe back to Minnesota but I needed to get back by Saturday as I was scheduled to work at the hardware store on Sunday. The only sure thing was that Dave wanted to visit a friend and cousins in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A major winter storm was forecast to pass right between us in Palm Springs and Minneapolis-St. Paul so we were going to have to be flexible as the storm's path kept being revised. We ended up going north through Colorado rather than east through Oklahoma/Kansas.

As is my custom now, I put together a video montage of the trip. It is available by clicking here.

A short recap and itinerary (though I won't guarantee my memory is serving me correctly):

• departed Palm Springs Monday, 01/31
• departed Santa Fe, New Mexico Thursday, 02/03
• departed Colby, Kansas Friday, 02/04
• arrived in Minneapolis-St. Paul Friday 02/04

We were successful in missing the winter storm. I love driving across parts of the United States. There is so much diversity. And with each season there are different things to see and do.