Day 14 - Starting Back East Via Palm Springs

Today we traveled from North Hollywood (or NoHo as they call it) to Palm Springs. We are taking a vacation from our cross-country trek by staying four nights here in Palm Springs. We rented a house on Airbnb and we splurged a bit. We got a three-bedroom house with a pool and spa. It is awesome! It will be great not to be in the car for most of the day and be able to just relax.

We left LA around 10:30 in the morning and got to Palm Springs a little after noon. There was almost no heavy traffic going East, but lots of backups going back toward LA. Today is the end of a three-day weekend and lots of people were headed back to the city to go to work tomorrow.

We drove around Palm Springs to explore a bit. Shane had been here before on business, but this is the first time here for me. They were having an art show in town, so we parked and walked around there for a while (see below).

We found a booth that was selling pottery bowls and dishes. We loved this large plate and it was only $28, which we thought was a great deal. So, we bought it. It is hard to capture its color in photographs. It is much more colorful than it appears in this shot. Though we had the free breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express in NoHo, we were getting hungry, so we stopped by Al dente, an Italian restaurant on the main drag. 

We couldn't get into our house until 3 p.m., so a nice lunch was a great way to put in some time until we could get into the house. Finally, we were able to go to the house. We were not disappointed. We unloaded our luggage, went to the store to get some groceries (including wine), and came back and got in the heated pool. We are loving life. 

Below is the map of our travel today. It says it takes almost 2 hours, but we made it in about 90 minutes because the traffic was light. You all might notice that we are traveling from left to right now, as we are on the way back home. However, we are staying in Palm Springs until Friday. Yay!