Day 17 - 2 Oct: Prescott, AZ, to Joshua Tree National Park, CA

Awoke to the sounds of talking and laughing from the boys downstairs, so guessed Dylan must be feeling better. When asked, he declared himself "as fit as a fiddle." All good - probably a dodgy hog wing on Route 66.

Continued our return dash to LA by crossing Arizona on a variety of relatively minor roads through uncompromising desert. Initially it was cool, with cactuses everywhere and interesting landscape...

..but it soon became a monotonous wasteland, a series of dead straight roads with barely another vehicle in sight.

Route 60 took us west between the Harcuvar Mountains away to the north and the Harquahala Mountains to the south, then we turned slightly north on the 72 to Parker, which seemed like a nice town. We crossed the Colorado River there and made our triumphant return to California, only to be faced with another 100 miles of Colorado Desert before we made it to Joshua Tree National Park and our campground for the night.

Having left at 9am and hammered the van through the 280 miles, we were there by 2pm, so after exploring the mad rocks around our site...

..we went for a wander to explore some others.

This place is as crazy as expected. The mad Joshua trees everywhere are cool, and very interesting in their growth patterns. It seems they only branch in certain specific circumstances, so you have some that are straight up with no branches, and others that are branched all over the place. What I don't understand is that the circumstances required for branching seem to be meteorological, so one would think trees near each other would have experienced the same conditions, and yet...

The rock formations are also mad. In such places it's inevitable that some formations will get named - Skull Rock, or this one, Cap Rock...

..but there are so many rocks of a certain type here that we're surprised the area isn't known as Bum Rock National Park.

This is my personal favourite.

Some of the rock piles look like someone has arranged them - although not Makka Pakka.

Actually the whole place feels a bit arranged because of the way the desert plants grow. As they compete for water they are quite spaced out - some even produce chemicals to prevent others growing near them - so it almost looks like someone has planted them deliberately apart. Adds to the weirdness of the place.

So after a couple of strolls among the rocks, trees and cacti, and having spotted a herd of bighorn sheep (all of us)...

..and a kit fox (Finley and Ruth), we went to Keys View on the south-western side of the park, to look out over the San Andreas Fault and Coachella Valley. We were going to wait for the sunset but it was too chilly.

While cooking dinner we found we were sharing our site with a very cute and quite bold kangaroo rat, who came out of his burrow for the night's foraging and stopped for a sniff right next to Ruth's feet. Probably not a great idea, considering how long it's been since we've had access to a shower...