Long Travel Day and Disappointment

 

We were packed up and away before 10am this morning.  I had planned on getting up to I-10 and across I-10 to Joshua Tree National Park, a pretty long haul for us old folk. 😀. But the town of Quartzsite was halfway along I-10, so I figured we could stop there if we wanted.  We stopped along the way at a Walmart for a few grocery items.  Doreen went in first while I tidied up a few things, but when Doreen goes off like that Harley gets very anxious.  Here he is hoping she will come back sometime!

When we got to Quartzsite, it seemed not too much farther, so we just kept on going.  Mistake!  Just a few miles on from Quartzsite we ground to a halt in traffic.  Stop and go because of road construction.  This went on for miles and miles.  Not only that, the whole of Interstate 10 was terrible, with a speed limit of 75 mph (120 km/h) and full of potholes as well as rough pavement where there was no pothole!  Miss Travelaire tried to keep up, but by the time we got here, her joints ached terribly.  Another problem was that I’d forgotten that there was a time change at the California border, so it was an hour longer than what Mr. Garmin seemed to indicate.

The end result was that we arrived at the visitor center of Joshua Tree at 4:05pm.  The center closed at 4:00pm.  We didn’t have a reservation for the campground, although I had looked earlier and there seemed to be no problem.  One of the rangers was just coming out of the center, so I asked him about it, and he said you need a reservation.  There’s no cell service there, so he said we had to drive back down to where there’s cell service to make the reservation.  So that we did.  But on the reservation website, it didn’t allow one to make a reservation for today.  Not only that, it indicated all the campgrounds in the park are full for tomorrow.  Hard to believe when everywhere else we’ve been, campsites were half empty!  Anyway, here we are camped just outside the park boundary on BLM lands (N33 40 26.6, W115 48 20.2) with a bunch of other RVs.  At least it’s free!