Borrego to Buckeye

 

Well, we’d been at Borrego Springs for about a week, and the restlessness was building, so we decided to pull out.  Now, if we’d known the Bayfield Bunch was going to arrive in a couple of days we might have stayed, but their decision to head this way was spur of the moment as well.

After a dump and a fill and some fuel at the Arco on the corner, we cut through Mecca onto the Box Canyon route.  On the way there are some ‘computer generated’ fields of intense agriculture as well as lots of groves of various fruit.

After a short trip we crossed over I-10 and picked out a scenic spot just on the south boundary of Joshua Tree National Park.  We’ve camped there a few times in the past and find it a handy spot, close to the park and the interstate, but far enough away to avoid most of the noise.

Of course it was mandatory at that point to spend at least one day touring around in the park, and that is likely the day that the Bayfield Bunch cruised by on the interstate and took the Box Canyon shortcut!

It’s a popular climbing location and most of the campsites close to the popular routes were full.

The scenery and rock formations are spectacular of course, although with the higher elevations, it was noticeably cooler.

A group of climbers carrying large pads headed off to their climbing routes of choice.

Hailey thought she would try her hand (err, paws) at this rock climbing thing, so she summited a few boulder routes while I belayed her from the bottom!

After that we moved east along I-10, appreciated the much cheaper fuel just across the line into Arizona, and set up a camp in the Saddle Mountain area near Tonopah. One of the main reasons for this is so that I could take in the Leafs vs Coyotes game in nearby Glendale.  It was a good game, but the home team managed to squeak out a victory.  A had several (!) good seats all over the arena, including right behind the Leafs bench, and right on the glass at the blue line.

 

We ended up staying in the area over Christmas like last year, but unlike last year, this year there were no murders in area – that we heard about.  Weather was a mixed bag, not usually too bad, but a few days of wind and dust, and on the nice days a swarm of bees or wasps seemed to like hanging around the rig.  Had a couple of hummers at the feeder, but no seed eaters helped themselves to the seed I put out.  A tiny but brave fox visited the camp a couple times, but I was never ready with the camera.  But I did get the camera out a few times for some more moonlight night time exposures.  There were also burro tracks, but none were seen.

Most of them, you would never know that it was night, or a time exposure except that the clouds are all blurred because they were moving during the 30 second exposure!

The rest were just standard sunset shots.

One of the advantages of being a professional blogging procrastinator, is that I haven’t had to suffer through as much Live Writer vs. Blogger adversity as the dedicated bloggers.  For me, this will be just my second attempt at publishing, since this whole issue arose.