We are breaking up the Jalamundo Road Trip into a few different parts to avoid crazy long posts and because some of the legs feel like their own separate little adventures. This part starts with our final week in SF, which was spent crashing at a different friend’s house every night and doing a lot of final goodbyes. We came back after Hawaii to get the truck, and since we decided to leave on the new moon because MEANING, we had to wait a week to leave. This was mostly cozy hang time with our buddies and getting some final stuff together, as we had already done the whole goodbye to city thing in October. Basically this was the longest goodbye to a place and people that ever existed. Especially since we had told folks we were leaving way before we even quit our jobs. So, although it was sad, it was time to finally go. This time, for real.
We took off and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway or Highway 1 to San Luis Obispo, where we stayed at the SLO Hostel in the historic district for a night. It was a really lovely converted house with a mix of business and pleasure travelers. We moved on from there to visit friends in southern California, where we did some touristing around. The Griffith Observatory in L.A. is super neat and we were pleasantly surprised by how great the hiking trails were around there. Hiking in L.A.? Who Knew!? From L.A. it was on to San Diego where we stayed with more friends and had a great time going to the San Diego Zoo.
After SoCal, we crossed our first state line into Arizona (!) where we enjoyed the cool desert air and visited some of Javi’s old stomping grounds. Javi had spent some time in Prescott Arizona during his grad school days to do some interesting sustainability work with the ECOSA institute. ECOSA, founded by Anthony Brown, offers students the opportunity to study ecological design surrounded by Prescott’s awesome natural environment. We visited the school and Mr. Brown while we were there and Javi got caught up on the latest ECOSA news. We stayed in Prescott that night and moved onwards to our next stop, New Mexico, where we spent about a week. Our friends in Los Alamos, NM are super fun adventurers so of course the first day was spent mountain biking down a freezing cold snowy mountain. We knew we were in good hands and came out alive and well, albeit a little bruised. The rest of the week was spent enjoying some cozy home time playing board and video games and exploring northern NM. We had a soak in the nearby snowy hot springs. We visited historic buildings and churches in Los Alamos and Santa Fe. We went to Meow Wolf (must see), a wild interactive art and literary adventure that has to be experienced to be believed. And we visited some artist friends in Truchas who shared lunch and some incredible life stories with us.
We then left our desert friends and headed towards a solid chunk of Texas family time. After stopping through Austin, where Javi went to undergrad and where his sister and her family live, we went on to Brownsville in way south Texas on the Gulf of Mexico where the rest of his family live. The Austin crew soon followed, and we all spent about two weeks enjoying each others company over the Christmas holiday. Javi has two sisters, each with a husband and two kids, so our time was mostly spent at his parents’ house hanging out with everyone and doing kid stuff. Christmas time in south Texas means perfect beach weather so the whole gang spent some quality time at South Padre Island as well.
Those two weeks and in fact the whole first part of the Road Trip flew by in an instant, and soon we were on our way out of Texas for the next phase. At this point the truck was still full of too many possessions and we were under pressure to make it to Chattanooga for New Years Eve so it didn’t quite feel like “life on the road” just yet but it definitely was starting to get there.
SF to Brownsville!!!
