More on the road

With the big storms coming in, we left Anza Borrego on Monday instead of Thursday as planned. We should have left Sunday, as we still drove through heavy rains and high winds, although there wasn’t any major flooding yet.

We took shelter for a full week in Mission Viejo, just east of Laguna Beach. My cousins Mary and Chris run a household that thrives on near-chaos. They’ve been taking in abused foster children and adult women for about forty years now and always have a house full of people and activity. Some of these guests stay for years, most of them get their lives off to a good start, and many of them stay in close touch. While we were there, live-in guests included Vera, a battered woman who has been with them for two years; Jason, their older son who has health problems; and Steve, a grandson of twenty who hasn’t quite figured out where he’s heading yet. Mary and Chris require that he have a job and be in college earning passing grades, and he goes along with the rules, although I don’t think he’s going to be a big success in college until maybe he gets a little older. Great kid, though. He turned twenty while we were there.

The weather finally broke on Saturday, and Sunday morning we left for Joshua Tree National Park. The western half of the park is high-altitude Mojave Desert, and that’s where we’re camped. The most interesting feature here is the granite rock formations. As they cooled and pushed up through an upper layer, they cracked and weathered, so that now they form massive formations of boulders, both giant and small, nested together in every imaginable pattern. They look like cushions stacked in perfectly fitted but wild disarray.

Our campground has the quite uninspired name of Jumbo Rocks. There is also the occasional totally unexpected palm oasis where water seeps up near the surface.

The downside here is that we hadn’t anticipated how cold it would be at this elevation, about 4,000 feet. The climate, though not the vegetation, is much like the Pinnacles: mid-50s during the day, dropping quickly into the twenties at night. We came down here to get warm, after all, and tomorrow, after only three days, we’re heading for some of the regional parks in the Phoenix area. Again, our guidebook, Southwest Camping Destinations, offers a number of choices.

We’ve saved a lot of money in camping fees over the last ten days. Staying with cousin Mary was free, of course, though I did insist on buying a few meals out in return for their hospitality. The camping fee here at Joshua Tree is only ten dollars a night.

Still, travel is expensive, and I’ll have to face the cold reality of my online bank statement tomorrow. It might determine how much longer we can run around out here in the desert.
But in four days when I turn sixty-two, camping fees in many parks drop to half the usual rate. I also start receiving Social Security next month, so I guess it pays to be old.