Seeking Bread and Deserts

First, A Word About Blog Writing

My first recommendation is that if you’re thinking about committing to a travel blog – don’t do it! Just joking of course…But it is true that you can’t grow a blog on a predictable timetable. It takes time for a storyline to emerge that has the right feel to it – length, density, interest, relevance. And then ultimately, you really need to write it for yourself — to be a story (with all the appropriate details) you want to document for your own pleasure as well as the pleasure of others.

Today’s blog did finally emerge – and it is about bread and deserts. (Sorry in advance for the length – it just seemed to keep wanting to be told!)

A Wet Hello to 2026

We celebrated the new year in rainy Indio CA, just south of Palm Springs and on the periphery of the record-setting southern CA winter rains. As you may have read, the late December CA storm has been described as the “wettest Christmas in modern history,” and caused widespread disruption, including mudslides and evacuations in burn scar areas. Many areas got twice or three times their historical records of daily rainfall, with some mountain areas getting over 16” in a day. This week, a second storm came through, and another is predicted for the weekend, dropping more rain on already soaked soils.

The rainfall marks a dramatic reversal from last year’s record drought that preceded the devastating Southern CA wildfires. Not surprisingly, scientists attribute these extreme weather swings to climate change, warning of intensifying “weather whiplash” patterns globally.

We’re just glad we are this far south of the eye of the storms!

Our new neighborhood with the mountains in the background

Our neighbor over the RV park wall. I guess it is comforting in case either of us has a heart attack. But we also get to hear about everyone else’s heart attacks as the sirens wail…

Chasing The “Flour And Yeast Trail” Across The Country

For tens of thousands of years, bread has helped make civilization possible. The earliest evidence of bread making goes back at least 14,000 years and since then, the milling of grains, mixing and kneading of dough, and baking of loaves has nourished our bodies, shaped cuisines, and anchored sacred rituals. In the Christian faith, it is central to a core prayer many of you know by heart, and juxtaposed against forgiveness and salvation: “Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” Few foods have carried such enduring material and symbolic weight across human history.

It turns out that fresh baked bread – with that signature smell of flour and yeast – has been part of both of our upbringings. Michelle grew up in a Polish/Italian family in Jackson MI. Her Polish grandmother – affectionately call “Babcia” – baked fresh yeast bread every day. On the weekends they would go out to the Polish bakery in town and get European rye bread. The bakery’s most unique feature was its 12-foot square, coal-fed oven that could hold up to 300 loaves at a time and stays a constant 375 to 400 degrees.

During the same time frame, my siblings and I grew up in small villages on the Yukon River in Alaska and our mother, “Char”, baked bread several times a week. For both of us, fresh bread created enduring exquisite culinary experiences – smelling and eating the fresh bread right out of the oven (once it was cool enough to cut) – with a generous portion of butter; and eating toasted fresh bread with butter and jam. Both give you an aromatic jolt that is just hard to duplicate.

We have been fortunate living in Tamworth NH to have a vibrant local craft bakery scene. Peg Loughran runs the Sunnyfield Brick Oven Bakery in Wonalancet, one of the Tamworth villages. She produces a wide variety of breads (whole wheat, spelt, rye, French, Italian), mixing all the doughs by hand using regional flours and house-milled grains, rising the loaves slowly with sourdough, and baking them on the hearth of a wood-fired brick oven.

A loaf of Sunnyfield sourdough Lauren has just taken out of their brick oven

Our daughter Lauren apprenticed with Peg and helped with the bread shaping and baking for several years. It was hard work and, depending on the season, required getting up at 1 or 3 AM on bake days to be able to have the bread ready for various markets by the early morning. As a result, Lauren is an amazingly talented bread maker. When the demands of motherhood (daughter Clara is now 7 years old) made the bakery hours untenable, she brought the craft home, supplying her home – and fortunately ours also! – with bread every week.

Lauren “gives us our daily bread” with these weekly loaves

Michelle and I also patronizes a terrific bakery in North Conway NH called the Old Village Bakery. They advertise themselves as a: “Retail scratch bakery featuring yummy bread, yummy coffee and yummy pastry made by nice people.” We can testify to their truth in advertising! Their Italian white loaves are one of our favorites. While it is great when it is fresh and soft, it also make stunning toast a few days later when it has “firmed up” – perfect for breakfast jam, roast beef sandwiches, or sopping up pasta sauce. Like many craft bakeries, you have to get their early – or reserve an order – if you want to be assured of getting any products. It is not unusual for them to open at 9 and be sold out of bread by 11.

This love of bread has inspired us to seek out craft bakeries in our Grand Adventure locations. The first connection was from specific flour that Lauren uses in her breads – all of which come from Hayden Flour Mills, located in Tempe AZ, a suburb of Phoenix. (We stayed outside of Phoenix for two weeks.) Hayden is devoted to stone milling ancient and heritage grains grown in Arizona. One of Lauren’s core flour blends for her sourdough bread is their Perfect Flour Loaf made from stone-milled Hard Red Spring Flour, Rouge de Bordeaux Flour, and mild Whole Rye (Flour. She also uses stone-milled organic, heritage flours from Maine Grains in her daily bread baking.)

We did not make it to the Hayden flour mill, but Michelle found a connection on their website to Barrios Bread in Tucson, so Barrios was one of our first stops as we settled into Tucson. The owner, Don Guerra (who Michelle, of course, quickly made friends with) opened the bakery in 2009 and is a recent winner of the James Beard Award for Outstanding Baker. Luckily, we got there early the first time we went. There was already a long line, but Michelle got it on time and snagged some of the last loaves, including some to die for focaccia. Wednesday, we went back and got fresh pasta, again getting the last two bags. You could hear the groans in the line when the word traveled back that the pasta was gone! The following Saturday we went back and – it being a holiday weekend – the line was too long to be convinced we’d get anything after waiting.

Don Guerra with a loaf of bread from Arizona grown wheat flour

Here in Palm Springs, we found another awesome bakery – Bread and Flours, where one of the owners hails from Nashua, NH. (Another Michelle quick best friend!) We visited them yesterday and brought home multiple breads and best of all, four gigantic cookie variations.

Our next RV neighborhoods are in much more remote locations, but who knows? Maybe there will be more gems on the flour and yeast trail we will find – Michelle has a well-honed nose for sniffing them out! Certainly, by the time we get to the Bay Area…

Getting Back Out In A Very Different Kind Of Desert

It should come as no surprise that in New Mexico and Arizona, Michelle and I fell in love with the Sonoran desert landscape. It is so different from our Northern forests, where vegetation is densely intertwined, with oak, maple, beech, pine and spruce roots tangled together and complemented by dense moss, ferns and grasses. In the lower alpine zone, the conifer understory crammed tightly together, making the concept of “bushwacking” entirely untenable.

No bushwacking here…

The desert by contrast, in addition to being so much dryer, often feels more like a sculpture garden than a forest. Each cactus and tree occupies its own space, and stands like a finely crafted piece of art. There is an austerity and cleanliness of the design that is very compelling. And then of course there is the nature of the silence. Sometimes total on a windless day – a silence so deep it is almost loud.

Hiking trail? Botanical garden path? Sculpture garden? Hard to tell…

It goes without saying that we fell in love with the Sonoran region’s signature cactus, the saguaro. What’s not to love about the saguaro? They take 10 years to grow the first 1”; can grow to over 40’ tall; can live for 200 years; don’t grow arms until they are 75 years old; can weigh 8,000 lbs when loaded with the hundreds of gallons of water they can store; and function as a keystone species supporting desert wildlife, including the world’s smallest owl, the Elf Owl, that is only 5” tall and weighs less than two ounces.

A saguaro “forest”

This saguaro is beckoning me up the Mount Superstition trail

And this critter just wants to hug me…bad idea

A major reason for coming to the Palm Springs region was its proximity to the Joshua Tree National Forest. Joshua Tree is a very different desert ecology than the Sonoran desert that we enjoyed in New Mexico and Arizona. The Sonoran desert is considered a “subtropical” desert that has higher rainfalls (11”-12” a year) and lusher vegetation, whereas the Joshua Tree desert is considered a “high” desert and is much dryer (3”-6” a year), colder, higher elevation and characterized by sparse vegetation.

On our second day in Indio, we took a three-hour drive through Joshua Tree and it was spectacular. Yesterday, after several days of rain, I was itching to get back out on a hiking trail and hiked Warren Peak and the Panorama Loop (9 miles with modest elevation). When I left, it was sunny – but the mountains ended up being in thick clouds all day. Hiking in clouds had a pleasure of its own, but I didn’t get to enjoy any new vistas.