We reached the end of our round-the-world trip a few months ago and since the end of January, we have been settling back into "normal" life in Santa Monica, California. We are, however, loathe to retire our wandering shoes altogether. And, since everyone seemed to enjoy the blog so much, we thought we'd keep it going! So we have decided to continue writing about our adventures. Our next challenge? Since we enjoyed visiting and writing about the National Parks last summer, we've decided to try and visit all of them!
In all, there are 58 National Parks dotted around the United States. On our road-trip last summer we managed to visit and write blog posts about ten of them - Rocky Mountain NP, Arches NP, Canyonlands NP, Bryce Canyon NP, Zion NP, Capitol Reef NP, Yosemite NP, Grand Teton NP and Yellowstone NP. So we have a lot of work still ahead of us.
Luckily, we checked one more off the list a few weeks ago - Joshua Tree National Park.
Joshua Tree lies 2-3 hours southeast of Los Angeles and is for most of the year a hot, arid desert. In spring the cooler air and winter rains make it much more verdant and the spring flowers provide a blanket of color. This year the rains have not been overly abundant and we've been told the flowers are not at their finest but they still brighten up the desert landscape.
The park is known for it's namesake, the Joshua Tree, a yucca plant which only grows in the Mojave desert. No two trees are alike and they are striking amid the desert scenery.
We were lucky enough to get a good campsite spot in among the Jumbo Rocks which protrude randomly from the desert floor. During the day we could scramble up, over, and around the rocks.
At sunset we enjoyed the colorful sky perched above our campsite and admired the flickering of our campfire on the rock walls around us.
Within the Park itself there aren't that many marked trails and we quickly covered the ones we were most interested in. The whole park is really one giant trail, so next time we'll just get ourselves a map and head out on our own - with lots of water, of course.
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