It’s another beautiful day here in Southern California and we’re going from the desert to the hills back to the beach to rest before beginning the next leg of our journey, which will take us up north. Today, we’ll be leaving Palm Springs, heading through Riverside, Chino, Chino Hills, Yorba Linda, Anaheim Hills, etc., before making our way back to the ocean. While we will miss Bill’s Pizza, the sand dunes are off the list. It seems like the sort of place we’d want to rent a house for a month, not live permanently. We’d both miss the colors, plants, and vibrancy of a place like Temecula wine country.
Aaron and I weren’t feeling Palm Springs so we decided not to stick around for another day, instead back tracking to Laguna Beach this evening, from where we will start the second major loop of our journey, this time heading north. This was our drive out of the oasis in the desert back toward the coast …
After being in the desert for more than an hour, we approached civilization again …
We drove through Ontario, which wasn’t our thing, and on to Chino … It’s good to see green and flowers, again.
I love the attention focused on landscaping the main boulevards through a lot of communities. This was Chino, heading towards Chino Hills …
I also like the multi-tier effect used in several towns thus far, where a small plant is combined with some sort of climbing plant, a wall, and then trees on the backside. I imagine it serves partly for privacy as much as it does for beauty. This is a side, closer view of the road in Chino from the previous picture.
We made our way over towards Yorba Linda … It had a lot of nice houses, good demographic statistics in terms of income and education, and a decent location.
It’s hard to dislike a place with strawberries …
… Christmas trees …
… and oil. I mean, come on … what’s not to like about that? I was surprised to see this oil derrick out in the open. Most of the ones in Los Angeles are hidden behind fake facades so the typical resident doesn’t even know they are there.
Traversing the streets of California makes these two Midwesterners nervous because it takes a second for our brain to realize you don’t have frost, sleet, or snowstorms. This was especially true after we took some sharp, steep, and somewhat scary back roads between Chino Hills, Yorba Linda, and Anaheim Hills since Apple routed us that way.
[mainbodyad]With all of the mountains, beaches, ocean views, trees, and desert, many of your towns and neighborhoods are arranged around panoramas. It’s all about sight lines and clear shots of amazing natural landscapes. We don’t have that luxury in most of the country. If someone were to design roads like the ones we drove today, the moment the first winter storm arrived, a whole lot of people would be dead, there would be houses with SUV-sized gaps in the living room, and old ladies would be screaming hysterically as they skated uncontrollably down the hill. There was one road we saw today that a parked car was so vertical, you could see the entire backside and trunk from the front. It was the craziest thing; I don’t think I could ever adapt to that. If you all ever did get a freak ice storm, part of me would crack up at half of your population trying to reach their homes on foot, let alone by car.
It makes so much sense why certain parts of the country freak out when they get half an inch of snow. To those of us who deal with several feet at a time, I think the general consensus was y’all were wimps. Nope, your infrastructure isn’t equipped to handle it. I get it now.
We have to remind ourselves that it is safe to drive on roads like this one in Anaheim Hills …
Aaron was laughing about how much it would suck for a kid to drop his ball and watch it roll down five miles because of your neighborhood construction techniques … This was another one in Anaheim Hills. This particular curve went down quite a ways …
The same “Oh yeah, it doesn’t freeze here” still happens when we take an underpass and see flowers in the middle of the concrete barrier. It’s just downright bizarre. These would have no chance of surviving in Kansas City. Someone would plant them once then never make that mistake again. I really enjoy seeing them everywhere, at every turn, even in the wild.
Flowers growing in random places like this can’t happen in most parts of the country … winter will kill it. This was outside of Chino Hills as we were making our way down to Yorba Linda and Anaheim Hills.
And speaking of plant life, the diversity of trees you can grow is much greater here. This was some random side street shot in Anaheim Hills …
The trees by the road in a random neighborhood in Anaheim Hills …
We need to get back to Laguna Beach, where we are going to stay for the night before getting up tomorrow morning and heading up the coast to Montecito, Santa Barbara, etc. Since we liked the downtown area so much and want to get to know it better, I’m going to try to book a hotel near to the water on my iPad so we can drop our bags then go out exploring.
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