Today I will be using a wiggle it once, push it down and hit it with your hand tap.
We checked out of 29 Palms, the motel cost £36 for the night and we made our way to Joshua Tree National Park about five miles down the road on Highway 62. You wouldn’t even know you’d driven into the park apart from seeing a visitor’s centre as you went in. The normal road just carried on through more desert and wilderness but now there were signs of land management. Along the roads were “information stops”, pull-ins where you could see particular points of interest accompanied by signs giving you information about whatever it was you were looking at. The Joshua Tree Park was very big on rocks. Massive rock piles wherever you looked, sculpted naturally into fantastic shapes all resulting from molten liquid oozing upward through the earth’s core more than 100 million years ago.
We hadn’t had much luck with National Parks so far. We weren’t able to see much of Yosemite because of the atrocious weather and we had to miss Death Valley altogether because of the lack of time so it was a great relief to be able to spend a few leisurely hours driving slowly around this park. The weather was fantastic, trouble was, now it was too hot! We all had a good time looking at rock piles and more rock piles and then some more rock piles. There was also an area of the desert called ‘The Cactus Garden’ which was filled with cacti as far as the eye could see, many in flower. A boardwalk had been constructed over the sand so that visitors could walk around and in between the cacti in comfort. The desert’s also very big on Yucca plants too.
We left Joshua Tree and headed for Palm Springs, one hour’s drive away and got there around 4 pm. We booked into a motel called The Royal Sun Inn and the weather was still wonderful. Clear blue skies, sunny and hot, the sort of weather we expected California to have all the time but apparently not…..not when we come anyway. It was a nice motel, more like a hotel really and it had a big pool with sun loungers and all that stuff so we didn’t have to think too long about staying for two nights instead of the planned one. We needed to relax a bit and this was the ideal place to do it. We had a relaxing evening, got a takeaway from Pizza Hut and wound down.
Emma and Sophia wanted to do some serious shopping before we went home so we decided to drive out to the ‘Westfield Shoppingtown’ of Palm Desert the following day.
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