Week 16 Made it to California For Now

March 12, 2023

This is the week we made it to California but the weather isn’t very no looking very good. They are having blizzards, flooding and so many roads are impassable. Most of the National Parks we wanted to see here are closed due to weather conditions. We are not sure if we want to find a place and stay put until or head to another state for a while until the weather improves. That is a decision we are still in the process of trying to make so we will see what next week brings.

3/6- Arrived in Yuma, Arizona today, which is our last stop before California. Due to all the snow this year throughout the Sierras we decided it would be best to enter California on Interstate 8 to avoid any chance of driving through snow. Not something we want to attempt. We had a short drive today and arrived at our Harvest Host location, Dirty South BBQ. We found out that Waze Maps has no idea where they are located and took us past the place. Fortunately we spotted it and were able to find a place to turn around and head back. They close at 2 pm on Mondays and we wanted to have lunch there so we were glad to arrive at 1 pm. They are famous for both their BBQ and their Date Milkshakes. Frank was brave and tried the Date Shake but I went with a Nutella Shake. Frank had a BBQ Tri Tip sandwich which he said was good. I went with their Cheese Nachos. https://dirty-south-bbq-house.business.site/?utm_source=gmb&utm_medium=referral

After we had our meal the owners showed us where we could park for the night. The spot was far enough off the road that there wasn’t a lot of noise and with them closing early we had a nice quiet place for the night. Only one other rig was there for the night and we got to visit with the couple who were on their way to Alaska. Frank and I took a hike down to the Bridge to No Where. It was just a short distance from our RV. The bridge to No Where was built in 1928 and was one of the earlier suspension bridges. It carried cars over the Gila River until 1968 when a dam was built upstream diverting the river and making the bridge no longer of any use. https://azdot.gov/adot-blog/yumas-bridge-nowhere . We woke up the next morning to Quails visiting us which has special meaning to us because Frank’s mom loved Quails.

3/7- Made it into California. We had never been on Interstate 8 before and it changed from desert to mountains quickly. I ended up taking pictures of the views we saw from the road. Once we got inside the California state line we saw so many fields of California poppies along the roadside. We struggled to find a place to stay that didn’t cost a fortune and ended up finding a campground in Escondido that had a space next to their maintenance yard and then we could move the next night into a regular campsite. Since it was the cheapest place by far we grab it and got settled in for the night.

3/8- Frank got up and worked this morning and then at noon we were able to move into a regular campsite at the Champagne Lake RV Resort. It was just down the road from the Lawrence Welk Resort. Lawrence Welk used to have a show we watched as kids so we found that amusing. We had planned to see some things in the area but the traffic was a nightmare and just getting to WalMart to get groceries took us over an hour so we hunkered down in our campsite and reaffirmed that we are not big city people. We are supposed to head up through Central California before heading to the coast and up to visit family but the weather reports are full of flooding so we are revising our plans.

3/9 We decided that we would head to Palm Springs for a few days and see if things had settled down and we could get back on track. We made a short stop to see the dinosaurs in Cabazon. They had been made famous in a few movies such as Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure. We walked around the whole dinosaurs and even climbed the stairs in one to a gift shop but we didn’t pay to go into the full display of little dinosaurs. We got some fun pictures for the grandkids and headed on. We ate lunch there and headed out for a short drive to our campground.

We managed to get into our campground in Desert Hot Springs just outside the city limits of Palm Springs. Frank has adjusted his work schedule so he starts at 6 am PST and then takes a break for travel around 11 am and goes back to work later in the day. Since we had such a short travel day he went back to work mid-afternoon and was able to finish his day early enough for us to do some fun things in the evening.

We drove up to the Palm Springs Aerial Tram. The rotating tram car takes you from the desert floor and 70 degree weather up 2 ½ miles to Mt San Jacinto State Park where the temperatures where in the lower 40’s and there was deep piles of snow. The views were amazing going up.

Once we got up there we walked around and admired the view. We had dinner in their Restaurant with a view while we waited for it to get dark. Then we were able to take pictures from the top of the mountain of the lights of Palm Springs before taking the tram back down to the desert floor. https://pstramway.com/about-us/

On Thursday night Palm Springs shuts down a good part of the downtown area to hold their Village Fest, a street fair with 180 vendors. So once we got down the mountain from the Aerial Tram we headed into town to experience the street fair. We saw statues of Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe as we walked through the area and checked out what was available. I was able to get a gluten free treat and some gluten free cheese empanadas while Frank found some beef jerky. Then it was time to head back to our campsite for the night. https://villagefest.org/

3/10- After Frank got off work today we headed into Desert Hot Springs to Cabot’s Old Indian Pueblo Museum. Cabot began building his Hopi Inspired Home in the 1940’s. He used reclaimed and used material to build his house. He sun dried bricks himself for the buildings. The Pueblo has four stories, is 5,000 square feet and includes 35 rooms, 150 windows, 30 rooflines, and 65 doors. He filled it with items he collected from his travels.

Today his home functions as a museum where authentic Indian items and displayed and sold. We enjoyed our tour of the home and seeing how he and his wife lived. https://www.cabotsmuseum.org/about-us/pueblo/

When we got back to the campground we had to try out their hot spring hot tubs. There were three hot tubs and each one was a different temperature filled with the desert mineral water. We ended up in the hottest of the three and enjoyed a nice long soak. After dinner we headed back down town to get some ice cream at Lappert’s. I enjoyed a cone of Hawaiian Sea Salt Carmel and Frank had a cone of Banana Cream Pie but it was so hard to choose with all the wonderful flavors they had. https://lappertspalmsprings.com/

3/11- Got up this morning and went to Pioneertown. It was built in the 1940’s and the backed by several of the popular Western stars of the time. Over 50 movies were filmed there between the 1940’s and 1950’s. Today it is a popular spot to film commercials and music videos. We hiked around and visited the different buildings and ate lunch at a rustic restaurant before heading back to Desert Hot Springs. https://visitpioneertown.com/the-story

After we got back to town we decided to stop by a RV dealer that we had been passing every time we left our campsite to go somewhere. We wanted to checkout diesel pushers as our gas RV doesn’t have a lot of power going up the mountains and seems to get pushed around a lot in the wind. It was fun checking out the RV’s and we saw one 2020 diesel pusher we really would have liked to buy.

3/12- This morning after listening to church we packed up the RV and drove up to Twenty-Nine Palms. We had decided that we needed to continue to head East for a while as more storms were rolling into California causing flooding and road damage. We want to move on up the coast but we want to make sure it is safe to do it. So we booked a spot at a Harvest Host location called Wonder Why out in the middle of now where. It turned out to be a popular spot and when we arrived there were four rigs already staying there. After we got settled two more rigs arrived. We meet the owners, a couple who has owned the land for years and is glad to share a spot for people to stay on their way through. We picked our spot for our rig and got settled then unhooked the Jeep and headed to Joshua Tree National Park.

We enjoyed driving around Joshua Tree National Park checking out the views and seeing the many different sized Joshua Trees throughout the park. We got to do a little off-roading on some of their dirt roads before heading back to our campsite. Just as we got to the gate to leave the park Frank realized he couldn’t find his wallet. He had put it in his lap when he used his National Park pass to check into the park and we worried it had fallen out at one of our many stops so we turned around and headed back into the park to search for it. After looking everywhere we had been we searched the Jeep one more time. As I laid across the front seat to look down between the seats I saw a small piece of white paper barely sticking out. I was able to climb around to the backseat and pull out his wallet with the paper sticking out. We were so grateful to find it as trying to replace everything in it would have been a nightmare. https://www.nps.gov/jotr/index.htm

Just before we entered the park we got a call from the RV dealer trying to make a deal on the Diesel pusher we liked. We use our 24 hours rule and never buy anything without praying and thinking about it so everyone including us will have to wait and see what our decision is regarding this new to us rig.