Borrego Springs, California

Our cruise will be leaving from the port in Long Beach, California tomorrow. The drive from Yuma is about five hours, so I decided to investigate hotels with park and cruise rates when I booked the trip.

I found a Quality Inn in Long Beach for $140 which included tonight’s stay plus parking for the seven days we’ll be gone and shuttle service to the port. Parking at the port is about $20 a day, so we decided to leave a day early just in case we would encounter any problems on the way.

The hotel is fine, although the first room they gave us had ants crawling on the wall. Our second room is good. The parking lot is not very big, and the spots are quite narrow. We have our full size pickup truck. Kevin did a great job squeezing it into a spot, but I sure hope we don’t come back to find it is all banged up. Hopefully, before we leave tomorrow many of the cars will be gone, and he can find an end spot to park in while we’re gone.

Since we left a day early, I decided we should drive to Long Beach via Borrego Springs. I had read about large metal sculptures in the desert, and I wanted to see them.

Our first stop was the visitor center where a very nice lady gave us a map. She also suggested stopping at the visitor center at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. We saw these fan palm trees. I had no idea they looked so bushy if they aren’t trimmed.

We watched an informative movie about the seasons of the desert. I was excited to hear that the park had 600 big horn sheep. Since we’ve been fulltiming, I’ve been in search of the elusive big horn sheep. A ranger told us that people were reporting seeing them on one of the trails, Unfortunately, it was a three mile hike, and my foot was hurting, plus we didn’t really have the time, so we didn’t do the hike. I did see these guys on display in the museum.

There are over 130 life size metal sculptures in the desert landscape surrounding the city of Borrego Springs. The sculptures were commissioned by Dennis Avery (his family owns the Avery Company that make labels and office supplies) who owns quite a bit of land in the area. The artist is Ricardo Breceda. There are all kinds of mythical and prehistoric creatures.




My favorite was the 350 foot serpent. The two tale sections actually are across the road.

Most of the sculptures were life size including horses, an elephant, camels, turtles and quite a few others. I also liked the dinosaurs. It’s amazing how he made the metal look like scales and fur.

I did see some big horn sheep, but they weren’t exactly the ones I was looking for.

We left Borrego Springs and headed west on a road that went over the mountains with gorgeous views. There are way more mountains and desert in California than I ever imagined.

The closer we got to Long Beach, the worse the traffic got. I’m sure glad we don’t have to deal with the traffic on a regular basis. They must have a law that allows motorcycles to drive between cars in the lanes. The first time a motorcycle came zipping between us and the car in the next lane was quite unnerving.

After checking into the hotel, we headed to the ocean. We took a nice long walk along the beach and watched the sunset.

Supper was at Del Taco, a new fast food restaurant for us. Can’t say I was all that impressed. I doubt we’ll eat there again.

Today was a fun day. We’re looking forward to several more on the upcoming cruise. We’re going to take a break from the internet while we’re gone, so see you when we get back.

After writing this entire post with all the pictures in LiveWriter, it wouldn't post to Blogger. I've been using LiveWriter for years, and really like it. I'll be really bummed if it doesn't work anymore. After redoing the post in Blogger, I remember why I don't like creating posts there. The spacing is off, but I'm done messing with it.


Don’t wish upon a star – Reach for one!