Joshua Tree National Park

It got cold here in Indio last night and I tried to start the heater in the camper. Connected the gas, turned on the heater from outside the camper, turned on the thermostat. Nothing. Tried everything I could think of at 3 am. Nothing. In the morning, I read the instructions. Put a new fuse in. Nothing. Carol woke up and said we should look behind the heater to see if there is something wrong with the wiring behind the heater. So I lifted up the sink and the furnace started working. We are now calling it the sink switch.

We ate the no-cook oatmeal which turned out great even if I did forget one ingredient. Carol loved it. We picked up my National Geographic guide to the national parks and my parks passport and headed off to the south end of Joshua Tree park. First stop was Cottonwood Spring visitor center where we picked up a map, bought some post cards, and had a chat with the parks volunteer ranger. As we drove along the Pinto Basin Road, there were pull-offs regularly. Being fresh, we pulled off at all of them, got out, walked around and took photos. The south end of the park is in the Sonoran Desert which has certain types of plants and cacti, like yucca, collas, and an invasive wild misletoe whose red color makes them stand out in the brown desert. The high point of the drive thru the Sonora was the cholla cactus garden. There were thousands and thousands of cholla stretching for miles down the canyon. We walked along a wide path lined with stones, and discovered that the cholla were getting ready to bloom. We were about a week too early.



We also discovered that the cacti "sing" in the wind. I tried to capture the song they make in a movie. The 40 second video doesn't really capture the musicality of the wind thru the cacti.

We also stopped at Pinto Mountain basin, which is a wide, flat area at the base of the mountains that used to have a river that sustained herds of camel, elk, buffalo, and rabbits. There was also an ancient Native American tribe that called that valley home. Now it is just barren desert and no one lives there. We were fascinated by how much the physical space has changed over 9,000 years.

We tried to stop and take a 0.3 mile hike to a natural rock arch, but there was no parking anywhere, so we had to pass that feature up.

Next up were the Jumbo Rocks, which looked like the backsides of giant elephants. They were cool rock formations. Lots of kids and teenagers were climbing all over them. At the visitor center, the park had some cards picturing this scene and it was labelled "Homo Sapiens Climberus." We enjoyed the playful sense of humor of the staff. Carol & I climbed up just a little bit and took lots of photos.


Shortly after this, the park changed from Sonoran Desert (at 3,000 foot elevation) to Mojave Desert (at 4,000 foot elevation). The climb was very gradual and we didn't really notice it, but the vegetation started changing and we saw our first Joshua Tree. So, we had to photograph our first one. From then on, we took dozens of photos as the trees changed from one single tree to dozens of trees to hundreds of trees in groves to practically a forest of Joshua Trees. Pat turned into a tree hugger.



We took a little detour off the main road to visit Key View. The view was indeed spectacular, but what we will always remember about Key View is the wind. We had to brace ourselves and lean into the wind and hope that we could get a photo before the wind blew us backwards. One of the other people up there with us said the wind was 70 mph. I would believe it. I have never been in a gale force wind, perhaps until now.



We tried unsuccessfully to find the Hidden Valley trail in my National Geographic National Parks guide. The problem is that there were 3 locations all called Hidden Valley. We walked around at one of them and had fun, but we don't think that was the trail they talked about in my book. That Hidden Valley is where cattle rustlers used to hide their ill-gotten cattle until they could sell them. Being tired and hungry by this point, we opted for dinner in Joshua Tree (the town). With help from the Visitor Center, we ate at Sam's Middle Eastern and Pizza restaurant. I had Naan stuffed with coconut and golden raisins with a honey glaze, and chicken Korma. Carol had a vegetarian Daal. It was excellent! Who knew one could find great food is such a tiny town! On the way back to Indio (we took Highway 62 instead of backtracking thru the park), we stopped in Pioneertown which is about 5 miles north of Yucca Valley on a little windy mountain road. Some of the Skare relatives in my genealogy owned a trailer park in Pioneertown in the 1940s. The whole tiny town is still sort of a replica of a TV set Western town. We stopped at Pappy & Harriet's roadhouse. The roadhouse was packed to the rafters with people. More people than could possibly live in the town or its surroundings. We couldn't find a seat, so we twirled around the place and left.

The drive back on Highway 62 was interesting. We had been gradually been climbing in elevation all day during our drive thru Joshua Tree. Now we were descending in one constant downhill descent that had trucks going 40 mph for what seemed like about 30 miles. The descent never ended! Then we got lost a little trying to get off the freeway (I-10) from the opposite direction we had gotten off when we came into Indio the night before.

Day 15 - Climbing to Joshua Tree

Carol & I met for breakfast with her friend K.C.; had breakfast, packed up the car, and headed for Joshua Tree National Park in Indio, California. We arrived in Indio at 4 pm, and set up the camper. I just could not back in, so Carol & I were going to push it in, when the guy next door came over and helped us. We are staying at Indian Wells RV Resort, and so far everyone has been really nice. The only problem is that we can't figure out how to open the door to the restrooms.



Let me backtrack a little. Along the way, we passed the Salton Sea which was a really sad sight. It used to be a huge salt lake in the middle of this desert. But it has been drying up for years and is now just a tiny lake, with miles and miles of salt so thick on the ground that it looks like snow. And the sunsets in the mountains are amazing.

A Day at the Beach

Jean and Bud took me to sight see at the beach today. First we went to the LaJolla beach. The beach is below a bluff and at the top of the bluff is a linear park. The City has built small little screen houses with three benches around the 3 walls facing the ocean. Jean said that she used to make breakfast of muffins and fruit and bring guests and family members to those little houses to eat breakfast and watch the waves break over the beach. She has fond memories of that. We walked along the top of the bluff and I took some photos. At one spot there is a curved sea wall that creates a protected beach. Bud said this used to be called the Children's Pool and was available for children to swim in protected from the breaking waves. However, now it has been taken over by pupping seals and is closed. We got as close as we were allowed to the seals sunbathing on the beach.


Then we unintentionally took a tour of the beach neighborhood of LaJolla because the City was doing a lot of street work and many streets were blocked off. It is a lovely, upscale suburb with a lot of Rodeo Drive type shops, yoga studios, and high end art galleries.

Next we drove over to Old Town. When San Diego was first settled as a cow town, this area was the first part of the area settled. There is a replica of what the town looked like in the late 1800s at the Visitor Information Center. Old Town is laid out with a large rectangular village green surrounded by old historic buildings - some of which house museum-type displays of what used to be in that space, such as a sheriff's office and a schoolhouse, and some of which house shops like jewelers, clothiers, etc. We walked around the village green and stopped in a few buildings. In the tobacco shop, the owner has his own personal collection

of pipes on display. One of his pipes is 5 centuries old. Most of them are 17th and 18th Century. And he sells pipe tobacco, cigarette lighters, etc. The sheriff's office boasts a wax sheriff and a desk for the circuit riding judge who would hold court there. The schoolhouse is a one-room school. The Commercial Hotel is still a hotel, although it is undergoing renovation and so is not open for booking rooms right now. The photo is of me bellying up to the Commercial Hotel bar.

A couple of cowboys were on the village green presenting Shakespeare plays in a hilarious old-West way. We watched the tail end of Hamlet. And Hamlet was a ham.

We ate in the Spanish mission style building that adjoins this Old Town at a central courtyard restaurant called Casa de Reyes. The meal was excellent, but huge. And the smallest margarita on the menu was 12 ounces; largest was 58 ounces. I got the 12 ounce margarita and had to leave some of it sitting there.

We drove over to Coronado, but took a twirl thru downtown on the way. The Hotel del Coronado is amazing. It is absolutely huge. It sits on a peninsula, and must take up about 3 city blocks. This hotel played an important role in Marilyn Monroe's movie "Some Like it Hot," but has been featured briefly in many, many other movies over the years. The photo on the left is the back of the hotel and the photo on the right is the front.

There was a guy creating a sand castle on the beach right next to another even more elaborate sand castle. I asked him how long his sand castles last. He said that the more elaborate one was his also and it was a week old. He creates a new sand castle or some type of sand sculpture at least once a week. Often he gets paid to do special birthday or anniversary editions. Very cool. The sand on the La Coronado beach was straight out of central casting. It was so soft and fine, it was almost powdery. As you can see by the photo on the right, I have worn appropriate footwear for the beach. Cousin Jean is barely visible in the far right corner of the photo on the left.

More Genealogy

Today, some of Jean's Skare cousins, Carole Thompson and Jean Soenes and we spent the entire afternoon making another mess on Jean Shogren's dining room table, talking genealogy, sharing stories, and sharing photographs. Carole and the second Jean are descendants of Johan Skare and Nilje (Knudsen) Skare. I got some missing information filled in and learned a lot more about the mysterious Stener Skare - international man of mystery.

Then in the evening, Jean's sister Rosalie and her niece Marit came over for dinner that Bud had whipped up. He made a wonderful beef stew in the crock pot. We laughed and laughed and laughed. Marit taught me how to play a dice game called "Greed." I even won one round.

San Diego Zoo

Jean and I visited the San Diego Zoo today. Jean is a member so she got me a guest pass. We started out our visit by taking the guided bus tour of the whole park so I could pick out the places I wanted to focus on.

The star of the bus tour was the 2 month old giraffe, who was extraordinarily cute. The first place was the panda exhibit. We walked thru the fern display, across a bridge, and into the panda garden. There was a zoo keeper there talking about the pandas. She spends a lot of time with the pandas and had some really interesting information. The female belongs to the zoo, and she had a male child at the time I visited.

Apparently panda's have a limited amount of maternal instincts and when they are done, they are done. Period. And this panda was done. So, they had to move the 19-month old panda to its own enclosure. Jean told me that the agreement the Zoo has with China requires them to return the baby panda to China when he is 24 months old. They are such cute animals, but the zoo keeper warned us not to let them fool us. Pandas can be quite dangerous. But the two we saw today were really cute! BTW, this picture is photo shopped; they would not let us handle the pandas.

We had lunch near the Asian cats - Mandarin chicken salad and pot stickers. Both excellently prepared, and huge.

We walked to the Asian waterfowl exhibit. The Asian birds were gorgeous, but the most interesting thing about the exhibit was that local ducks and egrets had discovered the enclosure and decided that zoo keepers feeding them several times a day is a good thing and had moved in. The exhibit did have some beautiful black and white Asian ducks and some grey Asian egrets. So, their American cousins probably felt right at home.

We took the Kangaroo express bus up to the elephant odyssey exhibit. It looks like that space had recently been remodeled and expanded. They have about 6 elephants there, half of them Asian which you can tell because they have smaller ears and bigger heads, and half of them African because they have larger ears and smaller heads. Jean and I were captivated by Minda, who the sign on the display said had lived 35 years of her life alone, and seems to prefer to be by herself in the enclosure. The day we were there, she was indeed by herself. Since elephants are primarily herd animals, it was sad to think about what her story might have been. The zoo keepers had come up with a new game for the elephants. They had created large cubes with holes in them. The cubes were stuffed with food, and then hung on chains from a large structure that looked like a giant umbrella stand. The elephants had to try to get the food out of the cube while it swung back and forth on the stand. They did seem to enjoy the game. We also saw a maneless wolf - which is not actually a wolf, and a California condor, which is really huge close up.

We got back on the Kangaroo express to ride back to the entrance, but then changed our minds as we approached our destination and decided to go on the Skyfari ride, an aerial tram that transverses the park. We could see a long distance from that height - the San Diego bay, and Balboa Park which is right next to the Zoo. We decided to take a twirl thru Balboa Park. But first I had to visit the Kid Store and buy stuff for my grandchildren.

Balboa Park was built for two expositions: the Panama Exposition in 1915 and the California Pacific Exposition in 1935. All the buildings remain and San Diego has discovered cultural and history uses for the

structures. We walked in along El Prado street with buildings that out-Rococo'ed Rococo style. The exteriors are so dense with sculptural features, they can only be described as Byzantine. We walked thru the Plaza de Panama where we could see the San Diego Museum of Man which looked like a cross between a Spanish church and a Moroccan mosque, but was actually built for the Exposition. We continued on to Spreckels Organ Pavilion which looks like a Roman amphitheatre with St. Peter's Cathedral portico wings that serve as a kind of breezeway. There really are organ concerts in the park. And this guy doing a human statue in the park - with an occasional mime guitar concert.

We walked to the Houses of Pacific Relations. It is a circle of small cottages representing 36 nations exhibiting their history and culture. There were Norwegian, Swedish, Irish, Iranian, Chinese, etc cottages. They take turns putting on programs on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I bought some post cards. We twirled around the Museums and puppet theater int he Pan American Plaza. The sheer number of museums is overwhelming - sort of like the Smithsonian in D.C.

Then we backtracked to the Prado House of Hospitality with its gorgeous interior courtyard to the Botanical Building (photo above). We went inside to see the orchids and palms on display. There were orchids of every color, size, and description on display; more orchids than I have ever seen in one place. On the way out we walked thru the portico of the extremely rococo Casa de Prado.

Jean and I walked a lot today.

Bucket List Item: Complete Family History

Since I promised to work on or knock off some bucket list items on the trip, it was about time to start doing that. Since one of my bucket list items is to finish my mother's family's genealogy.

Cousin Jean inherited a treasure trove of photos of this family from her mother Clara. After a great breakfast that included tangerines she picked off her backyard tree this morning, we started looking thru boxes of genealogy stuff, old photo albums, and old scrapbooks. The women in this family loved to collect newspaper articles about family and paste them in scrapbooks - and as a family historian, I could just kiss them for doing that.

This family is just one reason that I wanted to stop and see Jean - aside from the fact that she and her husband Bud are really great conversationalists and have wide ranging interests. The first photo below is of my great-grandmother Hvill (also spelled Viel) on the far left with her mother (and my great-great-grandmother Barbro the only adult in the photo).



But the real find of the day was this photo of my great-grandmother Hvill (or Viel) Lesteberg as a young woman. I had no

photos of her until her children were grown before this. She was always a handsome woman, but she is really beautiful in this photo. I can see now why the newspaper commented "Success!" when she accepted by great-grandfather's marriage proposal.

Jean and I cleaned up the mess we left on her dining room table, and Bud took all three of us out to eat at Black Angus. It was a really comfortable and cozy space and the food was excellent. I had prime rib with mashed potatoes and broccoli.

Day 10 - Arriving in San Diego

Today was Day 10 of my Great National Retirement Tour. I woke up at 5:30 am and wrote in my journal and downloaded photos from my camera til Dan and Colleen woke up. Had trouble getting on the internet, so decided to update security and do a full scan. Someone from New Jersey hacked my Facebook page.

We had breakfast, packed up the car, and hit the road – I-10. Except I had to come back to get the folder with my itinerary, journal, and memory book.


We drove all day again. 415 miles from Tucson to San Diego, most of it on I-8 – flat as a pancake thru the desert and then the last leg thru some 4,000+ foot mountains as we approached San Diego. I have logged over 2,600 miles total so far on the Tour. There was virtually no wind on

what can be a dangerously windy road. On the bright side, we saw some impressive sand dunes at the Arizona/California border and some equally impressive huge rock formations in the Jacumba Mountains.

Carol went to stay with her friend K.C. and I am staying with my mother’s cousin Jean. They live on a hill (as does almost everyone in San Diego), so the camper is parked on a wing and a prayer. Bud made really good dinner while Jean and I looked thru her Skare genealogy box. Tomorrow Jean and I will have more adventures with her genealogy boxes, scrapbooks, and photo albums.

I think I should explain this map. I made up the maps before we left Saint Paul. Then we made a mid-course correction and decided to take the southern route along I-10 and I-8 rather than the northern route along I-40. So the map looks like we drove around in a loop, which we did not. But don't fear, we will get that loop driven before the trip is over.