Family Vacation, Part 2 - Joshua Tree

We got up this morning and enjoyed our breakfast at the motel (Joe really enjoyed it from what I hear--three bowls of cereal, a blueberry muffin and I'm not sure what else before James put the kibosh on him!) and were on the road by about 9:00. We drove for an hour or so, then took a detour through Joshua Tree National Park. We hadn't realized until yesterday that we'd be passing right by that park on our trip. Besides, it allowed us to skip the whole L.A. area by heading north first, then west. Here are a TON of pictures. Our connection tonight is really bad, so I don't know whether to blame Blogger or the connection, but it made duplicates of several of the pictures for some reason. I'm too lazy tonight to care. You can just look at them twice. :-)

Here we are at the entrance--it was a GORGEOUS day, by the way. I don't think it ever got over 71 degrees. Sooooo much better than the weather in Arizona. I didn't bring in the brochure, so I can't possibly tell you what this plant is called. But we thought they were really neat. It's actually the same kind of thing I took a picture of James and Joe in front of on our "shortcut" yesterday, this one us just bigger and a whole lot fuller.
And this was in some sort of (can't remember the name of this either!) cactus garden. We've never seen anything quite like it--they look almost fuzzy. The pictures aren't nearly as wowing as it was in person. It just goes on and on and on in the background.
We thought it was so cool, here's the same picture again. ;-)

Joe was thrilled and quite proud of himself for catching a lizard.
Some of those cactuses... cacti... cactee (ha!) get pretty tall.
After a while we found this really cool place that God put there just for the sole purpose of climbing all over. You just can't help it when you see all of those big, billowy, bulgy rocks and boulders everywhere! The kids had a blast. (Look at the great western sky, Mom...)








And finally... here we have a Joshua Tree!
To be honest, they are not what we thought they were. James and I both had something different in our minds when we went there, but we had a great time anyway! Joshua Trees are apparently just giant yucca plants that don't know when to stop. Ha! They are really neat to see--I know I've never seen the likes of them before.

Look, here we are again! Still standing under that same tree. It was nice there... ;-)

This one was sooooo cool (so tall and so full), but it has recently lost a section. My guess is high winds. Who knows...

And more rock climbing before we left the park...




See the snowy peak in the background? Cool. :-)
It took about 2 hours to drive the 50 miles through the park (and get out and explore and climb a few times like we did) and by then everybody was feeling pretty hungry. The town of Joshua Tree looked pretty tiny and this was the only place we could find to eat. Cracks me up!
Sam's Indian Restaurant... serving pizza, subs, burgers and all sorts of other things. It smelled funny in there (like Indian food, I would assume), but the pizza was actually quite good--and cheap.

James drove for about an hour and started feeling a little tired, so I took the wheel and let him take a nap. I tried soooooo hard to stay on Highway 18. That's all I had to do, just STAY on the same road I was already on. I knew it would take a crazy turn or two, but I was very conscious of that fact and was really concentrating on reading all of the signs and watching the mile markers and all that stuff. (As opposed to the Smith way of traveling where as long as the vehicle is still moving you assume you're getting where you need to be... then you suddenly SEE a sign--you haven't really SEEN any of them for an hour or more--and say, "Hey... are we supposed to be in Montana???") Anyway, I suddenly found myself passing through dumpy little houses with a sign declaring them to be a town (towns like Helendale and Hodge and Hinkley, named for the one family who lives there) and knew I had to have made a mistake. After studying the map a little closer I realized that I shouldn't have ever gone through Apple Valley (it sounded like such a nice place) and been on the Happy Trails Highway and Dale Evans Road. Anyway, the "shortcut" we ended up taking probably added 30 or 45 minutes to the trip overall. Could have been worse. The most unfortunate thing was that we ended up spending a few hours (even after we got back to a major highway) travelling through dry, desolate desert areas--but with nothing interesting to look at like in the National Park we were at earlier.

Finally though the scenery started to change--about an hour and a half away from Bakersfield, I think. We drove through mountains like I can't recall having seen before. They were more than hills, but not BIG mountains really. They weren't thick with lush greenery like what you see back east... They were more sparse, like the Colorado mountains, but they were GREEN and had other kinds of trees on them (not pine trees)--and the mountains looked sort of wrinkled up as you looked out across them. The longer we drove the prettier it got and we decided that we really, really liked this part of California. It's either very, very pretty or we were just very, very tired of driving through the desert! Ha! I know I stopped feeling desperate and thirsty once everything turned green. :-) This is the one picture that James took...

It was so much prettier than what this shows! Oh well. There were also places where there were hundreds (thousands???) of giant windmills sitting up on top of the mountains--it was sooooo neat.

Then it started getting not so pretty again and we headed into Bakersfield. Don't care for that city at all. Of course, it was really, really windy there and everything just looked dirty and run down--but it could have been because of the dirt blowing in the air. You could see the brown haze for miles around. Yuck. It took some doing, but we finally made it to I-5 and headed north. I'm not sure how far we traveled, but we should only have about 3 hours to drive to get to San Francisco tomorrow.

We also saw lots and lots of fields and orchards today. Tons of lemon trees and orange trees and grapefruit trees--and the biggest, healthiest, greenest grape vines I've ever seen! All of that was cool. But I was driving most of the way today (that never happens--weird!) so I didn't get any pictures of any of it.

We're staying in a place called Coalinga or something like that. I'm really not sure it's a town. It's more like an exit that was formed just for people like us who are traveling through this massive state and need a place to eat, sleep and gas up--that's all I saw, just a bunch of restaurants, motels, and gas stations. We went to McDonalds for dinner tonight (~gag~ -- Oh, I mean YUM!), then got everybody settled into the motel room and in their pj's. I ran across the street to the gas station to get myself a cappuccino (white chocolate caramel--YUM!!! For REAL this time...) and have spent the last hour or two trying to upload pictures with this lousy connection. Ha! Oh well. I hear children breathing heavily, so I'm guessing that means they finally fell asleep. They've all slept a little bit in the car each day--something they don't always do. I'm thankful that God touched and healed all of the little sick-o's and they feel up to traveling... but it's like they're still needing the extra rest--which makes traveling easier on them and on us. Perfect! Anyway, tomorrow will be our one and only visit to a big city: San Francisco. I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing the sights... then getting back to places with less people. ;-)

I'm too tired to proof read. Go easy on me. :-)