Nice Day in Joshua Tree National Park

 

There was no cell service here tonight, so my blog has to wait until tomorrow when we get back to civilization.

Here I am, writing up my blog.  Doreen took this picture sometime a couple of days ago when I wasn’t looking!

Out for our morning cup of coffee.  After yesterday’s weather, it is sunny and warm and calm this morning.  It’s so nice to sit out like this, and this actually turned out to be a nice spot with quite a lot of RVs spread out over the countryside.  I forgot to mention yesterday about the wind.  Not only was it cool, but the wind was howling and gusting.  Miss Travelaire hates winds like that; they almost blow her off the road, and the faster she goes, the worse it becomes.  With big transport trucks wizzing by on I-10, she had to be careful that a gust of wind didn’t blow her out of her tracks!  Today is so nice in comparison.

The sky up above as you look towards the zenith is so deep dark blue!  This is an unedited photo showing the true colour as it looks.

We set off up the road into Joshua Tree to the Cottonwood Visitor Center.  We got the same gruff, unhelpful ranger today as yesterday afternoon, and he was no help today either.  So we continued on up the road, and as we passed by each campground, they all said “full.”  We had sort of given up on Joshua Tree, but then we pulled into a road right by a ranger sitting in his car.  Now he was just the opposite of the ranger at Cottonwood.  He was so helpful.  And he looked up on the recreation.gov website to see about reservations.  We finally settled on Hidden Valley Campground, which is a first-come-first-serve campground.  The ranger said there are definitely free sites there (it turns out he looks after this campground).  He suggested we look at site 20.  So on we went to the campground.  A lot of the sites are quite small, too small for Miss Travelaire with her plump physique, to fit into.  As we came to site 20, there was another party just pulling into the site!  However, the couple of sites next door were ok, so we settled into one (N34 01 06.1, W116 09 47.8).

Now this is a rock climber’s paradise!  There were climbers all day all over these rocks, like these guys.

And this guy and his buddy.

These two walked by after they came down and said hello.  I just got photos of them as they passed by.

And, you can’t come to Joshua Tree National Park without a photo of a Joshua Tree!  (Of course, Doreen and Harley, too).