A Short Trip to Hemet, CA

The weather has been absolutely perfect here this week, so Paulette and I haven’t been doing anything too exciting – other than spending a lot of time at the pool or outside reading a book and enjoying the sunshine. With Sandy Lowery now safely back home, Paulette has lost her main shopping partner. The only time we’ve left the park, other than for groceries, was last Monday when we took a drive down to check out the city of Hemet, CA. It’s about a 45 minute drive from Desert Hot Springs heading towards Los Angeles.

Leaving Palm Springs it was all blue skies and sunshine, but we could see a big bank of clouds hovering on the L.A. side of the San Jacinto and Big Bear mountain ranges – a very clear, definite difference. These mountain ranges are what separate the desert, and the Palm Springs area, from the Los Angeles County basin. Sure enough, after a twenty minute drive, we were out of the sunshine and into a very cloudy, cool day.

At the top of the pass it was like night and day – looking back east towards Palm Springs was total sunshine, but west towards Los Angeles was completely overcast. The landscape is very different too on the “other side” of the mountain range - lots of farms, ranches and green lush looking fields with very little desert to speak of.

From Sands RV Park - March

There were, however, lots of interesting looking boulders and huge hills of rock all along the road down to Hemet.

From Sands RV Park - March

Paulette and I weren’t too impressed with Hemet. It’s kind of like two towns – the east side is very old and rundown, while the west side is brand new, has a shopping mall and a whole bunch of smaller strip-malls with the usual assortment of big-box stores. We toured around a bit but didn’t see anything particularly interesting about Hemet so we decided to head back without looking at any of the RV parks in the area.

The really, big attraction of the day, at least for Paulette, was our slight detour to the town of Corona so she could re-visit “The Calico Horse” quilting shop. This shop was her favourite from the ‘shop-hop’ she went on with the quilting ladies last week. It must have been good, because Paulette spent quite a while in there and came out with two bags of quilting stuff saying the store was ‘FANTASTIC’!!

The clouds and cool weather stayed with us all the way to the top of the mountain pass and then “voila’ – blue skies as far as the eyes could see!! We were definitely back in the desert and glad of it!

Tomorrow, Thursday, Paulette is off for a day of ‘Thrift-Store-Shopping’ with Donna and Diana. Just goes to show, you can’t keep a good shopper down for long – 2 days is about the max for Paulette without withdrawal symptoms beginning to emerge. For me and the mutts? Just another day relaxing in the sun!!