Joshua Tree
From Do You Know How Fast You Were Going? in Joshua Tree National Park, United States on Jul 13 '07
This entry is about:
Well Joshua Tree was not on our original itinerary, but Jake recommended it and it was close enough on the route to Vegas that we elected a stop. After some I-10 stop and go, we made it to Yucca Valley, CA, about twenty miles out from Joshua Tree, where we stopped at Denny's both for lunch and to get out of the heat. When Jon paid, the waitress requested his ID and then remarked "New York! What are you guys doing all the way out here?"
Good question. Jon explained the road trip, the seeing stuff, the driving far, the having fun and her response was lukewarm. First she asked us how old we were, implying that somehow we should be at home teaching our kids how to read instead of having silly adventures, and then she told us she was too afraid to do a trip like that because she'd seen a couple of horror movies where people on vacation get into nasty trouble (Wrong Turn was one she mentioned) and that had freaked her out too much.
You would think after 26 years, I would be fairly used to making the ditzy, totally inconvenient mistakes that I routinely make
Okay, despite all this, she seemed like a genuinely nice person and I tried not to hold her, uh, small world view against her. I was sort of confused though because although she had grown up in Yucca Valley, she was born in Hawaii and seemed to have no interest in returning there or being anywhere that wasn't Yucca Valley (population: 25,000).
To each his or her own. After Denny's, we went to a store they have out here called Big!Lots, which I think is funny. (It's a bold move, putting that exclamation point in the middle.) They sell lots of stuff, from furniture to guns to water. We just bought water, because the trusty triple A guide told us that there is absolutely no water available in Joshua Tree, and since it was 110 degrees, we figured it might be good to stock up.
We drove on and got to the ranger station at 4:59, managing to score a map and some recommendations on hikes from the Nicest Park Ranger Lady Ever just before she locked up. She kind of made me want to become a park ranger (a feeling I've had numerous times on this trip). Perhaps I should save the meditation on park rangers for later, but we've been considering them a lot (since they're the people we talk to the most and seek critical guidance from), and I think they lead interesting, weird lives -- kind of like writers. More on rangers when we get to Bryce...
Off to the campground, which was awesome. Sites around big boulders that provided some privacy from other sites and great views of the expansive, deserted desert. Then we walked around the Barker Dam, which some people built in the late 40s. Doesn't have much water today, but you can see that the area below the dam is still pretty lush and green. By desert standards. There was the requisite no swimming sign, although I've never seen anybody swim in a puddle.
We scooted back to the car so we could drive up to Keys View to watch the sunset, which was pretty cool. For those of you who don't know and/or care, Joshua Tree is perched above Coachella Valley, where a well-known and probably somewhat ridiculous music festival takes place every year. All I can say is I hope it's not in August.
After the pretty sunset, we got back in the car to drive back to camp and Jon requested his regular glasses, as it was too dark for his sunglasses. I won't go into a long-winded melodramatic description of my tearing the car apart. I'll just say that I didn't have Jon's glasses. As it turns out, I left them on the seat of Frima's car in L.A.
Admittedly, Jon was much more good-natured about this than I was. You would think after 26 years, I would be fairly used to making the ditzy, totally inconvenient mistakes that I routinely make, but it still frustrates me deeply. Especially because this mistake meant we were driving two and a half hours back to L.A. the next morning to retrieve them.
In addition to that being a bummer, we missed the Star Party (which we figured out meant stargazing, not that L.A. movie stars would be there) that the Nicest Park Ranger ever told us about. Instead we went to bed early and listened to the coyotes howl. I could lie to you and tell you that this was not scary, but what's the point? It was a little scary. This is mostly because the desert is so open and the acoustics convinced me that the coyotes were right outside the tent. Needless to say, I slept fitfully.
We got up quite early in the morning, had breakfast, broke camp and hit the road. Incidentally this wasn't a huge loss because by 9 a.m. it was already 90 degrees.
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