Day 20-23: Joshua Tree National Park, California

We woke up this morning to find that the fridge stopped working because the batteries were so low! Clint wanted to leave the food at the Cordners' while Theresa said pack it up and chance it. It was only a 5 hour drive so she was hoping the drive might charge up the battery or it would stay cold enough until they could plug in! We compromised by loading up the fridge with the promise from Theresa she would throw away all the food if it was not cold when they arrived in Joshua Tree.

After dropping off the rental car and gassing up, we made our way to Southern California to Joshua Tree National Park. Theresa couldn't reserve a site inside the park for another 2 days, so we were going to be at a private park outside of Joshua Tree. Things seemed to work in our favor, again, as we needed to have electricity to plug the RV in and hope the batteries would charge back up. It was dry camping in the national park, so we had 2 days to figure out if we needed to buy new batteries!

Our destination Joshua Tree RV Lake Resort for the next 2 nights was on the other end of Joshua Tree so we drove through the park to get there. Joshua Tree is famous for the trees it's named for but also for the huge rock formations. It's a rock climbers' paradise!

We got to the RV park by dusk and found that the batteries did in fact charge up during the drive. Best of all, the fridge was running fine and the food was cold! Awesome!

The next day we spent preparing for the next few weeks. We read that our campsite the next two nights in Joshua Tree had no cell service so we wanted to research Joshua Tree, make reservations for our next few locations, and map out our course. In the afternoon, Ariadne enjoyed feeding the ducks and huge koi in the lake. At night, we sat outside and enjoyed the bright stars in the sky!

In Joshua Tree, we walked through the Cholla Cactus Garden, hiked through Hidden Valley where Ariadne crawled through narrow passages made by the tumbled rocks, climbed up Skull Rock, and drove to Keys View to see the San Andreas Fault.

We camped at Indian Cove. We enjoyed another night of beautiful stars. Ariadne saw her first shooting star. The next morning Clint and Ariadne climbed up the rocks next to our RV. Then we went for a long hike. Thank goodness for the lizards that kept Ariadne occupied on the trails. The poor lizards had a huge monster in pink Addias chancing after them!