The Long Road Home (Let's Go Shopping!)
Apr. 8th, 2022 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerHigh Desert Weekend Trip-log #13
Back Home - Sun, 27 Mar, 2002. 11pm
We got home from our weekend road trip to California's high desert tonight around 10:15pm, 52 hours after we left. For a 52 hour trip it's impressive that I've written 13 blogs. That's a blog every 4 hours... including the hours I was asleep! 😅 The rate isn't really surprising, though, as when there's something fun and beautiful to do, I can write a lot about it. Five of these 13 blogs are about visiting Red Rock Canyon State Park, and we only spent 4-5 hours total there.
This final blog covers 8 hours of the trip. Those 8 hours were our drive home from the park. BTW that drive could have been faster than 8 hours, but we took a longer route & made several stops because... Let's Go Shopping!
Leaving from the park we made our first stop less than an hour later in Tehachapi. Tehachapi is a small town nestled high in the Tehachapi Mountains, in the pass between the Mojave Desert and the San Joaquin Valley. The small downtown is being revitalized to look like the old train station that used to be the remote town's main business. Today, though, we were only stopping for lunch.
Next up we stopped in Bakersfield. This was purely a shopping stop as we trolled a TJX discount store for more of those plates and bowls we've replaced our dinnerware set with. They didn't have any, so we got the hell out of Dodge. It's like the city motto is printed right on the signs: "Now leaving Bakersfield".
Bakersfield is where we faced a decision, though. If we drove north up Route 99 we could visit 2-3 more stores for shopping. But it would add time and distance compared to the fastest route home, crossing over to Interstate 5. We chose More Driving, More Shopping.
Our next stop was in Visalia. What can I say about Visalia? Yup, it's there. And their TJX store didn't have what we were looking for, either.
Our last major stop on the way home was in Fresno. Fresno has grown, surprisingly, into California's 5th largest city. With a population of 545,000 it has surpassed Oakland and the state's capital, Sacramento.
It's not just the city of Fresno that has grown. The metro area now tops 1 million. We shopped a TJX store in the city's fast growing northwest suburbs. Seriously, last time I was in this area (several years ago) it was farms. Now it's all shopping malls.
In Fresno we wrapped up the "Let's go shopping!" portion of our trip. Once again, we left empty-handed. Our next step to complete our dinnerware set will be to buy a few more pieces from eBay sellers at eye-wateringly high prices.
From Fresno it was still a few hours home. We made two more brief stops along the way, for gas and dinner. Thankfully traffic on the Sunday night return into the Bay Area was reasonable. We encountered minimal delays in the usual bottlenecks around Gilroy. We pulled into our own garage at about 10:15pm.
Total mileage for the day: 450 miles, including the drive to & around Red Rock Canyon.
Total mileage for the trip: 890 miles.
Back Home - Sun, 27 Mar, 2002. 11pm
We got home from our weekend road trip to California's high desert tonight around 10:15pm, 52 hours after we left. For a 52 hour trip it's impressive that I've written 13 blogs. That's a blog every 4 hours... including the hours I was asleep! 😅 The rate isn't really surprising, though, as when there's something fun and beautiful to do, I can write a lot about it. Five of these 13 blogs are about visiting Red Rock Canyon State Park, and we only spent 4-5 hours total there.
This final blog covers 8 hours of the trip. Those 8 hours were our drive home from the park. BTW that drive could have been faster than 8 hours, but we took a longer route & made several stops because... Let's Go Shopping!
Leaving from the park we made our first stop less than an hour later in Tehachapi. Tehachapi is a small town nestled high in the Tehachapi Mountains, in the pass between the Mojave Desert and the San Joaquin Valley. The small downtown is being revitalized to look like the old train station that used to be the remote town's main business. Today, though, we were only stopping for lunch.
Next up we stopped in Bakersfield. This was purely a shopping stop as we trolled a TJX discount store for more of those plates and bowls we've replaced our dinnerware set with. They didn't have any, so we got the hell out of Dodge. It's like the city motto is printed right on the signs: "Now leaving Bakersfield".
Bakersfield is where we faced a decision, though. If we drove north up Route 99 we could visit 2-3 more stores for shopping. But it would add time and distance compared to the fastest route home, crossing over to Interstate 5. We chose More Driving, More Shopping.
Our next stop was in Visalia. What can I say about Visalia? Yup, it's there. And their TJX store didn't have what we were looking for, either.
Our last major stop on the way home was in Fresno. Fresno has grown, surprisingly, into California's 5th largest city. With a population of 545,000 it has surpassed Oakland and the state's capital, Sacramento.
It's not just the city of Fresno that has grown. The metro area now tops 1 million. We shopped a TJX store in the city's fast growing northwest suburbs. Seriously, last time I was in this area (several years ago) it was farms. Now it's all shopping malls.
In Fresno we wrapped up the "Let's go shopping!" portion of our trip. Once again, we left empty-handed. Our next step to complete our dinnerware set will be to buy a few more pieces from eBay sellers at eye-wateringly high prices.
From Fresno it was still a few hours home. We made two more brief stops along the way, for gas and dinner. Thankfully traffic on the Sunday night return into the Bay Area was reasonable. We encountered minimal delays in the usual bottlenecks around Gilroy. We pulled into our own garage at about 10:15pm.
Total mileage for the day: 450 miles, including the drive to & around Red Rock Canyon.
Total mileage for the trip: 890 miles.
