I love stars! A night sky with a blanket of stars just calms my soul. Joshua Tree is exactly the spot for this and we spent three nights there this past weekend. The weather was nice, cool in the evenings and NO MOON! Which meant the stargazing was spectacular! Each time I looked up, I felt like God had thrown glitter into the night sky!
We arrived at the Joshua Tree Lake RV Park on Thursday, February 20, 2020 around 1:00. After taking trips for a little over two years, I finally decided to pack a lunch to eat on the way, thus stopping us from being “hangry” when we got there and then eating lunch at 3:00 – and dinner at 8:00! I know it takes time to learn things, but you would have thought we would have come up with this idea long ago! We arrived full and happy!
As fancy as last month’s campground was, this month’s was basic. Very clean and nice, but very basic. We had full hook-ups, but no concrete pad to park on, which made the site uneven. Luckily, I gifted Tom a set of Anderson levelers and they worked like a charm!
Friday we decided to go to Joshua Tree National Park and do some hiking. We were truly amazed at how many people were out and hiking at the park on a Friday morning. We hiked “Hidden Valley Trail” which the sign at the trailhead indicated had been a rustler’s hideout during the 1800s. Hard as I tried, I could not get James Gammon’s voice from Silverado out of my head; “You brought a posse to my best hideout?” It is a true statement that I live my life through movie quotes. I still cannot say Lone Pine without it sounding like Loooone Star from Spaceballs. At any rate, the hike was beautiful and the weather was gorgeous.
Since the Hidden Valley Trail hike was only a mile loop, we decided to try one of the other trails. The parking lot was full for the next one we tried, but we found “Skull Rock” right off the highway, stopped for a photo and walked the ½ mile trail to the end, where we turned around and headed back. On this hike, there were these odd formations on the rocks that look like someone had drawn lines on them. Tom decided his favorite explanation was a laser war between two individuals marred the rocks! Our next best option is to show the photos to Kacie, our friendly geologist, and see if she knows. Again, packing a lunch would have been a good idea – I’m a really slow learner!
Saturday was chilly and overcast and threatened rain most of the day. The couple parked next to us needed to switch sites as they wanted to stay another night and someone was coming into their site. The park had them move to the other side of our trailer. Now the park is not full by any stretch of the imagination and the rig that pulled into the HUGE site they vacated was a tiny Mini Winnie. Anyway, it gave us a chance to visit with Joe and Ashley who were from Florida. They had two children, 18 months and 4 months! Both boys were born on the road, they had not been back to Florida since her baby shower, and her parents had never met the baby face-to-face! This family of four lived full-time in a 30 foot travel trailer, their story was amazing! Joe is an engineer who works on airport renovations so they were heading to Texas for him to start his next assignment. Wow! I could never imagine.
We hung out at the trailer, took some long walks around the park and played some Yahtzee. It was a pretty relaxing day. I would have really liked to return to the National Park, but it was thundering and I thought rain and flash floods were a real possibility. We’ll make it back another time.
Tom and Patti's RV Adventure 