Hospitable green dinosaur strip.
Perhaps I should add some punctuation and depth the the quartet of words above..?
Wonderfully unexpected hospitality, which has been a core underpinning of what makes the Walk of Inspiration Across America so meaningfully successful to me, started off the day as Mary’s million-dollar pancake and soy-veggie scramble breakfast gave us the I-shouldn’t-be-leaving-so-fast feeling before hitting the road. Delicious vegan pancakes mixed with fruit and peanut butter, natural apple sauce, maple syrup, and the scramble were served to us in proportions far greater than what we could eat.
“Eat up,” she encouraged us, “you’ll need it!”
“This sounds a lot like Hansel and Gretel,” I had to tell her– after taking a while to remember which kids’ story was which. “Oh well– even if it is– this food is soooo delicious, that I don’t know if I’d mind being your Hansel!”
The fairy tale ended just past 8:30, as Mary motored us to the corner of Hargrave & Ramsey in Banning, last night’s stopping point. Warm goodbyes and promises to stay in touch accompanied the gift of wonderfully put together sack lunches for Shay and me– sealed with love.
There is no easy way to walk the 22 miles from Banning to Palm Springs. Google Maps offers a 75-mile walking route through the mountains, but we were determined to walk through the valley, and get there by nightfall.
We walked as far east as we could in Banning before reaching the I-10 freeway, which, with it’s “PEDESTRIANS PROHIBITED” signs, clearly wasn’t welcoming us. We walked for perhaps a mile in a grassy section a few feet from the shoulder of oncoming traffic. We were approaching a state weigh station, with state police busily present in front of it, and opted to walk through an adjacent cow field. Getting through the barbed wire with big backpacks, we stepped our way through the green grass around a cow patty mine field till seeing a dirt road which appeared to connect a mile down to a separate, paved road along the Cabazon outlet mall strip. Finding this worked out well, because we were just approaching a herd of cattle– almost all of whom where staring us down, many with sharp bull horns.
Off-roading lasted perhaps an hour, and actually turned out to be far more fun than the ugly outlet mall parade of plastic which followed.
At the end of the road of the greater Cabazon strip mall flytrap, we briefly visited the small theme park with the big, life-size (dead size) mechanical dinosaurs– none of which were on. A quick pic, and up across the overpass we went to what we’re told is the classic Route 66– now a frontage road between freeway and train tracks. Frontage 66 took us nearly all the way to Hwy 111– our turn off for Palm Springs.
Palm Springs was another good ten miles away, and as the valley floor beside the freeway was mostly sand, we opted to walk it instead of the busy highway. We paralleled the main road all the way into Palm Springs, passing hundreds upon hundreds of giant windmills along the way– some casting enormous shadows on surrounding hills as the sun began setting.
The desert sand abruptly ended in lieu of fresh, green, artificially grown grass. This was the opening sign of urban/suburban Coachella Valley– nearly all of which takes on such a theme.
Shay was experiencing lots of foot pain by dark, after 22 miles, so we took our host Ashley up on her offer of an end-of-the day, off-the-route ride– picking us up from a given landmark (to be returned to the next day).
Meeting Ashley and Kayla, her can’t-slow-down black lab, was a blast!
Another great, productive day down, filled with the great hospitality, green energy, and mechanical dinosaurs to counterbalance the strip mall setback!