3/5/17
Quite a snooze in this morning (haven’t quite got the body clock right yet!), anyway today is Joshua Tree NP. I’ve always had a bit of fascination with Joshua Tree NP… probably because of the U2 album.. so I was keen to see what this park was all about. JT NP is a desert NP and is studded with interesting rock formations (almost like the African Kopjes) and PLENTY of Joshua Trees! Its on the San Andreas fault line so plenty of steep cliffs and round boulders.
When I think of desert I think rocks, sand and in this case big yuccas (Joshua Trees).. however, I was pleasantly surprised to find a desert filled with wild flowers. Most of the JTs had flowers on them, lots of little cacti with brightly coloured spiky flowers and all the little shrubs were covered- yellows, pinks, purples, oranges.. every colour imaginable.. From a distance it looks like grey green sparse of foliage and white rocks but get up close and it is anything but!
We tooled around the park until lunchtime, where we had our first outdoor lunch in the blasting Californian sun.. crackers, cheese and cold meat.. tasty but we were soon back in the aircond and on our way to the border of Arizona. Leaving Joshua Tree we left the Mojave desert and moved into the Colorado desert. The Joshua Trees soon gave way to long open flat expanses of low lying shrubs surrounded by big rocky outcrops. We saw a few interesting looking fences and roads leading off into the surrounding granite hills… Absolutely certain we were seeing the outskirts of some of the infamous “secret naval/ marine bases”. We are in ICB territory so I’d say there is every chance!
We whiled away the endless miles speculating on how close you could get to a base and at one point we did need to google Area 51 to find out whether we were close.. we were miles out! (Area 51 is north of Las Vegas in Nevada and we’re a good 150-200 miles south of LV!)
We crossed the mighty Colorado (or semi slow flowing river- we’re south of the Hoover dam) and arrived into Arizona. Stopped to try our luck on some scratchies and a quick afternoon cuppa and pie, before jumping back in the car on an eastward heading.
Passed miles and miles of flat cacti filled surrounds (we now are in real cacti country- you know the big standing ones with a few branches coming out of the top) and eventually stopped ourselves in the town of Wickenburg. Checked in to a hotel and headed out into this old gold town to see what was happening!
First stop was some photos next to those ginormous cacti before we found ourselves in a old school “saloon” bar. First thing we noticed was this big flat table sitting in the middle of the bar.. A shuffle board! I’ve never seen one before! We sat ourselves up at the bar, ordered a beer (Blue Moon for me) and got chatting to a group of travellers who walked in just after we did. They seemed to know all about shuffle board and offered to teach us. Basically, reminds me a bit of lawn bowls. You have a puck (kind of like a light weight version of an ice hockey puck) and your goal is to get your puck as close as you can to the other end of the shuffle board table without the puck falling off the end. 4 points for a puck that is “hanging” on the edge, and then the table is graduated from 3 points down to 1. Similar to lawn bowls it is all about how many of your colour is closest to the end of the table. You play in teams- 1 person at one end pushing the puck, other person at the other end helping you with where to put the puck. Lots of fun and like all those types of sports easier said than done!
Eventually the game got a bit too much for D+I and we all headed into the restaurant for some baby back ribs and shrimp with salad.. Aah! I’d forgotten how well the yanks do BBQ ribs!! Finger lickin good!