We arrived in La Quinta later in the day and crashed at our lovely Airbnb. Cooking our own meals at least half the time, and having more space, is proving really good 🙂.

The following day temperatures had not dropped, in fact they went up peaking at 43 degrees 🥵, but we manfully ploughed on and visited the Joshua Tree National Park. This is a beautiful area of high desert which is covered in Joshua trees (not trees but we’ll brush past that) that were originally seeded by Giant Sloths a long, long time ago. Without these creatures the “forest” would be more like random plants dotted around the area. We enjoyed a lovely day, albeit we sweated a lot as we walked 😄. We also got our first look at the San Andreas fault, after all these years of looking for it 🙄, when looking down across the Coachella valley 👍.

We headed from La Quinta to San Diego over the mountains and via a small town called Julian, which appears to be the Cider capital of California 🍻. It is also renowned for it’s apple pie so we tried that as well 🙂. Our arrival in San Diego was a little fraught. For the first time the Airbnb was poor, very poor in fact. We cancelled immediately and argued we were due a full refund, which we are going to get apparently. We booked an alternative, a hotel, by the bay and lucked out. We were within 1 mile of the Gaslamp district, which we had been recommended to visit. It is a great, lively place with good bars and restaurants.

The next day we went Whale Watching and saw a Humpback whale 🐳🙂. We consider ourselves lucky to have seen such a magnificent creature, even if it was just a few fleeting glimpses each time it surfaced. We also saw Pelicans, Sea Lions and many other sea birds. Gem did amazingly well to avoid any sea sickness (it was a little choppy and others weren’t so fortunate) so we had a lovely few hours. We then headed to Balbao park, which it turns out is a really, really lovely place with a lot of very Spanish (Mexican) buildings, pools, a large glass house which was very beautiful, open green spaces and a whole area of local artist workshops.

The following day we visited the famed San Diego zoo. There is no doubt it is a wonderful zoo in terms of what it does for animals and the natural world. However, as we have experienced before, the number of people means the experience is somewhat lessened. We also felt it wasn’t better than other zoos we have visited in the US and France that don’t get such plaudits. Nevertheless we enjoyed it until it chucked down, then we had an ice cream and left 🍦🌧.

We left San Diego, feeling very positive about it as a city, and headed for Santa Barbara. We deliberately did not stay in LA but rather skirted it, for now, and travelled our first section of highway 1. Interestingly the beech houses (houses built literally on the beech on stilts or similar) which are so sort after really did not do it for us. They are jammed between the road and sea and frankly we would not want to be in one! Malibu had some nice areas but also some decidedly not so nice areas. The Americans prodigious use of concrete and need to have roads as big as possible sees to that. Santa Barbara on the other hand is lovely, so far. We had a walk on the beech this evening which was very normal and very nice. Tomorrow we venture back in to LA to at least see the main bits.