It is amazing to me that living in California for nearly 20 years we had never been to Joshua Tree. This made it the obvious first national park stop on our way out of SoCal. The added benefit was that it was only a few hours away from San Clemente, so we could get a few miles under our belt pulling the fully loaded airstream without taking on a whole day of driving. As Martha would say “this is a good thing”.
We had only done one practice trip of any significant distance prior to going all in on this 24/7 journey. I know that sounds a bit crazy, but that trip was smooth as silk. Our towing set up was perfect and everything rode great! The optimists that we are high fived ourselves in our minds and thought of course we nailed it and we can do this! During the journey to Joshua Tree we quickly learned that there is a difference between doing a weekend vacation in an RV versus towing everything you own in one. There are many different adjustments to make to get it “just right” and you can’t do that going 65 on the highway. So, we stopped more times to make adjustments than people traveling with kids stop for bathroom breaks. Still a majority of the time Gary was white knuckling it behind the wheel!
I don’t know if we were crazy or brave (probably both), but we were also going to take our first crack at “dry camping”. That means no hookups at all. No electricity. No water. No sewer. Let me make this clear WE ARE NOT CAMPERS. We are people who love to travel and being able to bring our home (and our creature comforts) with us. I guess that makes us glampers, but you have to admit we are fully committed glampers!
We wanted to take advantage of amazing park scenery and stay inside Joshua Tree National Park. That meant we had to bring in our own water with us and leave if we filled our tanks and had to empty. We also would get to test out our shiny new generator. We weren’t exactly roughing it 🙂
Little did we know that the Joshua Tree campgrounds get packed on the weekends. There are two campgrounds in the park that take reservations, but the rest are first come first serve. Since we were too late to get reservations we decided to take a shot on the first come first serve spots. We quickly learned for those spots you either get super lucky or come in on a Monday/Tuesday instead of Thursday/Friday to get a spot ahead of the weekend campers. After grilling the Park Rangers and waiting it out a bit like stalkers at the ranger office we ended up in the super lucky category and got a great spot in Indian Cove Campground.
Once we got settled we realized it was the first time we felt like we were experiencing exactly what we envisioned for our journey: national parks, amazing scenery, and being right smack in the middle of nature outside the matrix.
Best thing we did?
Hiking of course! We did a few short hikes on our own and saw the obligatory Skull Rock and Arch Rock (a teaser before heading to Arches National Park).
But, the best hike was spending time with friends Ziv & Jackie when they came to visit us from Pasadena for the day. We hiked to Barker Dam…it was a short hike with a beautiful oasis at the end to reward us.
The best part though was how Jackie & I can still be as silly as five year olds. We wanted to take a fun pic of us jumping above the giant boulders, which in hindsight required a coordination we did not possess. At least we made ourselves laugh with our gagillion attempts to get the perfect posed jump.
Thankfully our hubbies have patience for us and Gary was able to capture at least one perfect pic:
Best thing we ate?
This is easy…we are persimmon lovers and have even planted our own tree (when we had a house that wasn’t on wheels of course). While checking out the local farmers market in town with our friends before lunch, we got to try wonderful artisan bars made by Greyback Granola with ingredients sourced from local farms. The Persimmon Pecan Raisin was redonkulous! We bought a quite a few of them to keep us going during our airstream adventures. But, I have to say the Apple Lemon Clove was surprisingly good too.
What we learned?
Visiting National Parks is expensive! Investment in the America the Beautiful annual pass is 100% worth it. It is $25 -$30 to get in to most national parks and the pass is only $80 and is good for all national parks. Best money we spent so far!
Another important learning was those old school paper manuals are important when you don’t have Google at your fingertips!
Since we had no electricity at our campground, our fridge should have been running on propane. Well, apparently that is only if the connection is working! Day one we were too busy/exhausted to notice, but the morning of day two it was obvious all of the food we just bought was getting warm. Sure enough our fridge was not working. This was something we should have thought to test on our practice run…no wonder it went so smoothly! After multiple trips into town to get wifi and YouTube potential fixes, we finally got our fridge up and running. Too bad it was two days too late!
The last thing we learned on this stop was to be aware of the generator use windows and use them every time you can! Saving water was easy for us, but we didn’t realize how quickly we could use up our battery power. One night we were in the dark with our iPhone flashlights trying to get ready for bed. Thank goodness we had those charged otherwise we would have been like cave people trying to see with actual fire!
Next Stop: Detour…East Coast bound