Summer Vacation Trip - Day 5

We were both feeling tired so we slept a bit late.  As a result, we didn’t leave the hotel until around 0730.  We stopped for gas in Mojave (right next to the hotel) and Mollie used some of the cash from Grandpa Jim to pay.  Per my initial planning, we were about a day ahead of schedule, so I asked Mollie where she wanted to go.  She replied that she wanted to visit Joshua Tree National Park, which was about three hours away, and the Mojave National Preserve (which was on our "maybe" list).  I adjusted our itinerary accordingly and we headed east on CA-58.  We ate breakfast (snacks) on the way.  The nice (mostly four-lane) road cut through Edwards Air Force Base and I talked to Mollie about the significance of the location (and the airport back in Mojave).  Meanwhile, we made great time across the high desert and switched to I-15 in Barstow before getting on CA-247.  We were treated to some views of the snow-capped mountains near Big Bear and enjoyed the sparsely traveled roads all the way to Lucerne Valley.  We stopped there (0920) and picked up some food so we could have a picnic later.  Afterwards, we continued east to Yucca Valley.  As we drove, we started to see a lot of yuccas, junipers and pretty desert flowers.  We used VA-62 to reach the town of Joshua Tree and stopped for information at the park visitor center.  Mollie got another NPS Passport stamp and we then entered the park (via the West Gate).  I'd last been to Joshua Tree in 1995 but hadn't seen everything (and had forgotten more than I remembered about the visit).  We were fortunate that it was another beautiful, cloudless day, with temperatures in the high 70s/low 80s.  We pulled off the road a few times to walk through small forests of Joshua Trees.  We also spotted several people climbing the huge boulders.  Mollie told me that the place reminded her of the City of Rocks in Idaho.  Deeper in the park, we stopped for a short walk through a grove of different desert flora at Cap Rock and then drove up to Keys View, where we found a viewpoint from which we could see the Salton Sea, San Andreas Fault and mountains near the Mexican border.  We had been warned to avoid use of our car air conditioning because of a seasonal bee swarm and we did see a lot of them (fortunately, they didn’t bother us).  After the treat of the amazing vista, we then headed east again, stopping at the Hall of Horrors formation, the Saddle Rock (where I saw a climbing route called "A Cheap Way to Die") and the Jumbo Rocks.  At the later location, we took a walk on the Discovery Trail and climbed on the boulders.  Our favorite part of this stop was noticing that several of the rocks could be compared to other things.  There was one called Skull Rock and one called Face Rock, which appeared to contain new profiles every time we looked at it from different angles (I must have spotted 10 different people and animals).  The area started to get much more crowded, so we drove a little farther east and a little bit to the south.  Our last stop in the park was at the Cholla Cactus Garden (there were more bees there, so we didn't get out of the car).  Around this time, we ate our lunch (turkey sandwiches, chips and fruit).  Mollie told me she was ready to move on, so we headed north to the Twentynine Palms entrance and stopped briefly (for water) at the Oasis Visitor Center.  We then (1315) headed out of town on Amboy Road.  This route to I-40 was eventful, with spectacular valley views, evidence of volcanic activity (cinder cones) and slices of Americana on old US-66.  Mollie commented that she had really liked the park ("it's very chill") and told me she was glad we'd "detoured" there.  We reached I-40 by 1500 and drove east, resuming our search for license plates from around the country (we’ve tried every year but only ever managed to see 48 states in one trip).  When I commented that Rhode Island had always been one of the plates we didn’t ever see, Mollie told me that she wanted to move there so she "could drive around the country and help people with their license plate games" (I thought this was very funny).  Soon, we signs for the Mojave National Preserve and I took Kelbaker Road to access the interior of the huge park.  We stopped to enjoy picturesque views of the Granite Mountains and search the peaks for bighorn sheep with our binoculars (no luck).  We also took a short (off-road) detour to look at the Kelso Dunes, spectacular mounds of sand that reached 650 feet.  After driving about 25 miles north of the Interstate, we reached the Kelso Depot Visitor Center.  Mollie got another Passport Stamp and we watched the park video, which turned out to be an effective advertisement for the place (it definitely made us want to stay for more than one day).  We talked to the park ranger for almost 30 minutes, mostly about the possible whereabouts of the Mojave Desert Tortoise but also about a funny looking bird we'd been seeing all day.  Unfortunately, we had no luck with the identification, but the ranger asked us to email him with more details (or photos) of what we saw after we departed.  After touring the small museum (a fancy train depot for the Union Pacific that was in its heyday in the 1920s and has since declined in importance), we walked around to see the rest of the "ghost town".  The temps had reached the low 90s in the valley but there was a nice desert breeze.  At about 1645, we backtracked to I-40 and headed towards the Arizona border.  Motivated by her desire to get NPS Passport stamps, Mollie was a great help with directions, gas prices and lodging searches all day.  Because we were drained from the driving and heat, we decided to stop in Needles, where we checked into a Motel 6 near the east edge of town (1750).  I asked Mollie what she wanted for dinner and she told me she’d been dying to eat dinner Jack-in-the-Box since the trip began.  We went there for dinner (burgers) at 1805.  She told me the restaurant was really good.  We went back to the hotel and I went swimming in the pool (alone) and walked around nearby (to get more steps).  When I returned to the room, I tried to help Mollie upload all of her camera photos to Google but it wasn’t working well.  She was excited to go into Arizona in the morning and we went to bed at about 2200 so we could get up early the following day - for many more NPS Passport Stamps!