The dippy road and things didn’t work out as planned

11/16/2018    Elevation 1699

Mary need to have some routine bloodwork done so from Quartzsite we headed north about 65 miles to Lake Havasu for the night and have her bloodwork done, then decided to go to Joshua Tree National Park. That was around 150 miles of 2 lane road. The dippy part of that was about 60 miles long of ups and downs, it would be a fun road in a car, not really so much fun in the motorhome.

The dippy/humpy part of the road was mostly flat desert, I caught a glimpse of a sign that said something about the Mojave Desert. It also followed a train track, their must be a lot of board people out here because almost the entire way, the bank along the tracks, was filled with words and sayings. Sometimes they used different colored rocks, sometimes they used rail road ties, and you know how heavy they are. Don’t forget we’re talking miles and miles of this. Oh, and not a house in sight on the entire road.

Ok, so we get to Joshua Tree and here’s where things don’t go quite as planned. We stop in at the Visitors Center, so Mary could get her Passport Book stamped. There much to our dismay we discovered that only ALL the camp grounds in the park are full.

Dejected and totally bummed we looked online and found a “ free” spot at a casino, of course they want you to play there, which we did. Luckily we walked out about 32 cents to the good. With it being still early in the day we decided to drive another 100 miles to the South side of the park, we were at Twentynine Palms on the North side, to another free spot. We didn’t get to do any exploring today.

Now that 100 mile drive was something else. All the way into Twentynine Palms was basically an empty 2 lane road with very little traffic, leaving Twentynine Palms it turned out to be a busy 4 lane road with stoplights thrown in for good measure, nothing like going 50 MPH in traffic and getting stopped and started for red lights. And lets not forget the curvy steep mountain that we had to go down for a few miles before we get onto I-10. This brought us down to around 200-300 feet in elevation.

I-10 runs along the South side of the park, you remember that mountain we came down. Well, 10 miles of climb to get back to the top.

It was hot here to, I know a lot of you still living in the frozen north have been having ice and snow, as I was riding along in my short-sleeved shirt with the window down and arm hanging out the window, was thinking of you guys and thought I’m sure glad I’m not there:)