A Clear Night. Mojave Desert, CA. February 2017
A recap of the last week and a half. Coming to you from sunny Laguna Beach!
Valley of Fire, NV.
Huge, red, Swiss cheese-like holes dot the mountains and boulders here, making it easy to partake in some amateur climbing. Here we spotted the first of what were to be many small desert lizards, that scamper in and out of the crevices and pause in the hot sunlight.
Boulder City/Lake Mead, NV.
In Boulder City, we spent our time poking our heads into antique shops (no idea what the deal is but there are a tonne) and enjoying a patio beer before pitching up in a secluded area of BLM land outside of the town, feet from Lake Mead. This was probably our most beautiful sleep spot to date, surprisingly only a few miles from the unanticipated headache that was to be Las Vegas.
Las Vegas, NV.
In Vegas, it feels like you can get up to a lot and yet achieve nothing. Lowlights include: being roped into a FIVE-hour timeshare presentation for $200 worth of free dinner and slots (absolutely not worth it—never, ever, ever do this. Ever.), spending too much time wandering through and getting lost in casinos, feeling like shit. Highlights include: Freemont Street (Old Vegas Strip), cheap and secret pizza parlour, sleeping in a king-sized bed. I will happily spend the rest of my life never coming back here.
Death Valley National Park, CA.
Death Valley, though beautiful, was our least favourite national park so far—we romped through soft sand dunes and the camping was decent, but it took us hours just to escape the vast park and we are tired of driving.
Mojave Desert, CA.
We just stopped in the Mojave to sleep for the night, but it's worth remembering because the drive to a free campsite down the dustiest road we have encountered so far was just super fun.
Treehugger. Joshua Tree National Park, CA. February 2017
Joshua Tree National Park, CA.
Joshua Tree is still the desert, but the town community and the trees themselves (technically yucca plants) totally set the landscape and culture apart. We stopped at the laundromat in town first, desperate to clean our limited supply of clothes. Apparently the laundromat is the place to be. The town’s inhabitants (mostly snowbirds and hippies) flood in and out, chitchatting excitedly while they wait or fold. We ate breakfast at Crossroads Café. I ordered scrambled tofu and peanut soyrizo (and then died and went to heaven). We drove into neighbouring Yucca Valley and picked up some clothes at vintage shop The End, and finished off the day with a drink at Joshua Tree Saloon.
The park itself was packed, but thanks to Gigi’s appeal, a young guy from Santa Cruz and an older nomad gentleman with a loaded army-style rig offered to share a site with us. We spent the night swapping stories and ended up going brewery-hopping with Santa Cruz a few days later in San Diego.
When we left the park, we headed to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum, a 40-acre property chock full of junkyard sculptures, then Pioneertown, a ghost town a few miles away that felt like stepping onto the Wild West set of Westworld.
The girls. Moapa Valley, NV. February 2017
Palm Springs, CA.
Zach’s family has friends that live in a gated community here, so we spent the night drinking fancy cocktails and very expensive red wine, and talking politics, y’know.
Salton Sea/Salvation Mountain/Slab City/Borrego Springs, CA.
The Salton Sea is a body of water that is overly rich in salt and other minerals, causing the coastline to be strewn with dead marine life, mostly fish. It smelled awful, looked even more awful, but was a bucket list check off.
Salvation Mountain, on the outskirts of “the last free place in America”, is an impressive pseudo-religious art piece that took an impassioned elderly man the better part of twenty years to construct. It consists of hay, clay, latex-free paint. When we arrived, there was a gospel choir holding a congregation at its base, a moving rarity that we were very lucky to witness.
A difficult place to describe, Slab City is worth just looking up. This lawless region houses squatters, hippies, snowbirds, retired folk—all artists in some shape or form. I thought it was The Weirdest, Most Fascinating Place in America. We rounded out that day with a stop at Borrego Springs, a town dotted with larger-than-life metal sculptures by artist Anza Borrego.
A Desert Climb. Death Valley, CA. February 2017
San Diego, CA.
We really enjoyed San Diego, and as far as cities go, it was a breath of fresh air after our series of mishaps in Las Vegas. San Diego is a major hub for breweries, so we had to check out a few of those (St. Archer Brewing, Ballast Point, Pizza Port Ocean Beach). We were lucky enough to stay last-minute with a connection that I had made through a travellers’ Facebook group (street parking is highly verboten), in exchange for helping her to assemble some Ikea furniture. She had just moved to San Diego from Buffalo, NY, and is one of the nicest people we have ever met.
San Elijo State Beach
In San Diego, we picked up a surfboard at Coconut Peet’s: a repair shop full of eccentric, pretty stereotypical surf dudes. Last night we found a campground close to Encinitas, and Zach has just come in from the ocean. Today we continue up the coast.