The three-hour drive from Trabuco Canyon, CA to Joshua Tree National Park in Chiriaco Summit, CA, was impressive! We passed through several different types of landscape in a short time. Started out with lush, green hills carpeted with mustard flowers …

Passed through the tight rolling hills of Moreno Valley …

And almost immediately on the other side of the hills, we were in high desert …

Then low desert (we even passed a sign that said, Elevation: Sea Level, although we weren’t quick enough to take a picture) …

We are parked in a free campsite not far from the south entrance of Joshua Tree behind the General George Patton Memorial Museum (which is a very well-done museum with many exhibits, including an outdoor exhibit of tanks and other military vehicles). The owner of the museum has created about 15-20 dry campsites large and level enough for motorhomes. It’s free to stay here, and there is some noise at night from the interstate, but that didn’t stop the coyotes from waking us at 5 am today yipping their greetings pretty close to our site!

Yesterday we visited Joshua Tree National Park. So did everyone else, because the desert is truly in bloom now. This is what we were expecting of a blooming desert. There are so many flowers in this picture, some of which you can’t even really see unless you are there looking down at them because many are tiny flowering ground covers.

 

Now for the REST of the story (those of you who remember Paul Harvey just heard his voice in your heads). We arrived at our current campsite, Bob attempted to back the motorhome into the space, but the motorhome would not reverse. He drove until he was able to pull forward into a space, but as he turned the motorhome to clear the sandy “berm” at the entrance to the space, the windshield cracked … AGAIN. This is the third time the windshield has cracked in the same place.

The first good news is that Bob was able to fix the transmission issue by replacing the range finder, and we just happened to have one on board, so it only took about 30 minutes for him to fix it. (He continues to amaze in the motorhome repair department.)

The second good news is that the windshield could not have cracked at a better time, because we are only 90 minutes from Quartzsite, AZ. Last time we were in Quartzsite, we had a rock chip in our windshield fixed by a guy who did a really excellent job, so we called him up and he told us to bring our motorhome in Monday morning.

We got everything ready to go, woke up early today, made some coffee and started to bring in the slides so we could hit the road. Except the living room slide would not retract automatically. This has happened before, a shear pin breaks and we have to retract it manually. Except this morning, the slide would not retract manually, either. After almost an hour of working on it, Bob managed to retract the slide and we are now on the road to Quartzsite.

Just a little bump in the road! Hopefully the windshield can be replaced within a couple of days and we’ll get back on track. Stay tuned!