Yesterday we departed luxury and headed to normality for us. We are now at Augie's Quail Trail RV Park in Gila Bend, AZ, which is a town of about 2000 people (as opposed to the 600,000 of the greater Palm Springs area). Before we left Palm Desert we packed in a few more site seeing trips and shopping trips (both Costco and Petco were essential visits to stock up for more remote camping).

Rick and Abby at Petco 

Plus another wonderful dinner with Bill and Nancy Goodman. They were phenomenally generous with their time and as always extremely gracious hosts (Nancy's step mother passed away early in the week and they were trying to figure out how to get to Texas by last Friday - which they did but flights were difficult to find because of the Indian Wells tennis tournament). They insisted we pick some grapefruit from their tree to take with us on the next leg of our trip, and we complied.

Last Wednesday we toured Joshua Tree National Park.

The Joshua Trees were interesting but the geology was even more impressive (remember you can double click on the pictures to see them larger).

Palm Desert, where we were staying, is about 225 feet above sea level. One overlook in Joshua Tree NP is over 5000 feet in elevation and it was actually cold and windy.

Visible traversing about a third of the way down in the picture is the San Andreas fault (and yes there is actually a little snow on the very top of the far mountain).

Many of the cactus are blooming: below is a Mojave yucca.

And a Joshua Tree:

Other cacti like the Ocotillo are also in bloom:

Leaving Palm Desert we encountered a traffic jam:

Rather than stay on the interstate we took the first exit and wound our way through Indio to a highway that went by the Salton Sea and the Imperial Valley (all a couple of hundred feet below sea level).

We drove through Yuma and then to Gila Bend.

There is a reasonable amount of archaeology to explore from here so that's what we will be doing over the next week. And the cactus are blooming here too so we should get lots of pretty pictures.