Palm Springs

We made it to Palm Springs after getting through the crazy outskirts of Los Angeles traffic.  Everyone is in a hurry, lanes kept getting narrower, lots of trucks and construction, merging traffic that doesn't look prior to merging, etc.  This is when I know I'm not a big city girl.  

Palm Springs area is beautiful for being in the middle of the desert - lots of resorts and golf courses which provides a lot of greenery and color with all the flowers.  A mile outside of the towns, then it turns totally brown again with all the sand and desert terrain.  We had enough room to park the motorhome and Explorer in our space but had to store the trailer across the park which worked out just fine.  We enjoyed meeting all the people and watching the roadrunners and bunnies scurrying throughout the park.  

We went on two day outings while in the park for the two weeks.  Craig went out one day on a motorcycle ride and we went out to lunch with friends we met in the park for great Mexican food.  We also spent time at the College of the Desert craft fair - very interesting southwestern crafts.  We were able to again buy fresh fruit and vegetables and of course my favorite - fresh flowers.

The first outing was to again check out some of the nearby Thousand Trails parks.  The first was the small preserve in Idyllwild, cute town that I would go back to but not with the motorhome.  The sites were way too small and the park was above 6,000 feet.  It was 80 degrees in Palm Springs when we left and only about 45 when we got to the Idyllwild preserve.  We then went down to another preserve called Wilderness Lake between the towns of Menifee and Hemet and would definitely come back to this park with the motorhome.  On our way back to Palm Springs, we experienced one of the deserts storms, black clouds over the mountain, large rain drops and wind gusts.  When the wind blows, the sand can cause brown outs and they start closing roads.  We made it back to camp just fine, but they were closing all the roads towards the mountains.  We experienced two more major wind storms while we were in camp - lots of sand blowing everywhere which created lots of clean-up inside and out!!

To the northwest of Palm Springs is a large area of hundreds of wind turbines.  There were so many in such a small space that as you are driving through you almost feel like you are "going to lift off".

We spent another outing seeing the area to the south of Palm Springs.   We went to the Salton Sea which due to the water draining, most of the area has been abandoned.  It was so hazy that day that we didn't get any pictures.  We then went onto Salvation Mountain in Niland, CA where a man had who has just died spent three decades painting religious messages on a tall mound of adobe hill and vehicles.

Then onto Slab City.  That was quite an adventure and I know the pictures don't capture the real environment.  Lots of mobile housing - trailers, tents, motorhomes, some surrounded by barb wire and any materials they could find in the desert to stake their property outline.  We saw a couple of trailers that had dug holes in the ground for their sewer holes.  This was an entire community with little businesses, Internet cafe and The Range (see pictures below) - their spot for weekly entertainment.  Unless you had solar panels and generators you had no power and all water had to be hauled.  Not my environment for camping.

We then had to go through border control to head north.  I was a little nervous about it not knowing what to expect, but they just waved us through.  As we were driving through I did see a person with a dog searching a car that had just been pulled to the side.  We then travelled to Joshua Tree national park.  The entrance we went into we could not go far as they had some wash outs from recent rains.  We did enjoy seeing the terrain and all the cactus that was blooming.

The rest of our time we spent in camp meeting people, walking every morning, riding our bicycles, etc.  Seemed like the days just flew by.  We met a couple from Yucca Valley and spent two Sundays with them watching NASCAR on their outside TV.  We had so much fun with them that we look forward to future visits to see them.