Day 56 - South Entrance to Joshua Tree

After three days of going to see museums and places, today we are not really going anywhere. We did go to the south entrance of Joshua Tree Natl Park where there was a nature walk with lots of flowers in bloom. All of the rainfall they’ve had around here the last couple of weeks has brought a lot of color to the desert. I have no idea what any of the flowers are but just took a couple of snapshots showing them off.

In the picture on the right, you can see I-10 in the background. We are camped about four miles down the road. The Chiriaco family built the gas station/restaurant/store before the highway was built. They also raised the funding and governmental support to build the General Patton museum and own the land that the free campground is on. Lots of travelers services. I had taken out some salmon to thaw yesterday for dinner but it was still pretty frozen at 6pm. No problem, just walk down to the restaurant. Having these services close by the free campground has been really nice and even though this isn’t “boondocking”, it’s convenient. We aren’t watching our water consumption as carefully as we did at Quartzsite so I added the ten gallons of water that I had been carrying around in the truck. Each five-gallon container took only a coupe of minutes to drain into the tank.

Tomorrow morning, we move on to another Thousand Trails RV park in Palm Desert for ten nights. We only made it to 98% on the battery bank due to cloudy conditions this afternoon. This was after a completely clear morning. Then I ran it down to 90% by running the microwave and the Instant Pot making dinner.