And we're off!

Our Western Adventure 2014 has started.

Ready to roll!

This year, I'm going to try to limit the blogging to one blog per stop. Last year, I did one per day which, since most of our stops were one nighters, pretty much amounted to the same thing. We have no one nighters planned this trip so this will make a difference.

Today's hop was supposed to be 117 miles to an RV park in the town of Joshua Tree. The instructions that we had received for arriving at the park were to turn left immediately after entering the park and then set ourselves up in site 6 next to the Bounder (that's an RV manufacturer). After getting ourselves set up, we were to go to the office to check in. Upon arriving at the park, we discovered that none of the sites were numbered and there was no Bounder to be seen. Leaving our rig where it was, we walked down to the office, only to find that it was closed from 1-2pm (it was 1:05pm).

While we were looking, a trash truck driver got down from his truck and tried to help us. He couldn't find site 6 either but helped us in another way. He mentioned that he collected from all of the RV parks in the area and that the Joshua Tree park was probably the worst (it really was a dump). He told us about his favorite park, 15 miles farther on, in Twentynine Palms.

The Joshua Tree park was one of the few that we've run into to that didn't take a deposit or credit card number. We're all for the honor system but this place was awful. After confirming that the Twentynine Palms place had room for us, we moved on. The 2 parks are as different as night and day. Twentynine Palms is a larger and much nicer town as well and we would have had to pass through Twentynine Palms on the way to our next stop so it's not even out of the way.

That's the National Park in the background (I think).

During that last leg beyond Joshua Tree, we saw 2 of the Blue Angels out for a training run. We had heard that they were recently recommissioned after being decommissioned during the govenrment shut-down. Guess they must be training down at their Winter home in El Centro.

-JC-