May 20, 2007

May 20, 2007

We start the day by stretching our legs and hiking up nearby Mt. Ryan for a birds-eye view of the surroundings. It only takes us 90 minutes up and down. Across the road is another bunch of Jumbo rocks. Aimee lets me be a kid for a few minutes and climb to the top. What a great place for a family with a bunch of boys.

Heading northwest now to the park exit, we see why the national park was formed. This section of the park is full of these Jumbo rock piles and surrounded by a forest of Joshua trees. I had never seen a Joshua tree before but they are to the Mohave Desert what the Saguaro Cactus is to the Sonoran Desert around Tucson. They look like a cross between an Elm tree and a Palm tree. They have the branched trunk of a shade tree with a cluster of palm leaves on the tip of each branch.

Around noontime we head out of the park northwest towards the Roy Rogers Museum. Apparently we need to get a new map as the museum was moved to Branson, MO. We spend the next hour in a traffic jam unsuccessfully trying to find an RV park with Internet and TV, something we easily found in the wilds of Wyoming and Montana. Apparently California isn’t as modern as I thought. We spend the night in Hesperia, CA.