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.

A social week

view of Rockies from hotel

view of Rockies from hotel

Theoretically this is my last week in Denver.  Monday we went a National Hockey League game at the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver.  It was the Colardo Avalanche versus Calgary Flames.  The Pepsi Center is nicknamed "The Can."  And speaking of cans...the Flames opened a can of whoop-ass on the Avalanche.  Flames won 9 to 1!  Nine is a really high score in hockey.

Last night we went to the gym together.  And tonight we are going to Boulder to watch IBM's Watson take on Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy.  If you haven't been following Jeopardy, an Artificial Intelligence computer built by IBM is taking on two Jeopardy champions.  Ken Jennings has won the most Jeopardy matches of anyone and Brad Rutter has won the most money.

Stark but beautiful

Driving to client site in the morning the sun is rising behind me.  The landscape is all greys, browns and tans.

The few trees are bare and fragile-looking. But the Rocky Moutains in distance are blazing white with snow.  The front range is still snowless and the trees look almost black from this distance making the snow-covered mid-range standout even more.