Joshua Tree, San Diego, and Tijuana

Joshua Tree NP is bizarre. Just like a Dr. Seuss book or something with weird trees and desert scenes and colors and big boulder rocks dropped around for no reason like a giant was tossing pebbles around, all framed by mountains and the constant smog glow of L.A. way out in the distance, 200 miles away, the brightest thing in the night sky, just opposite from the Milky Way, the entire galaxy outshined by L.A. at night.

I went for a run around dusk just following a little dirt path out into the desert, and it was really deserted. I saw maybe 5 people the whole day in the park and now at night it was just me, running 5 miles out into the desert and probably 5 miles away from any other living person and the sun was going down behind these weird branching trees stretched all out towards the sky. It was a good run, and good to be back out of the elevation, Joshua Tree NP is around 3000 feet in the Mojave so I could breathe again. Then I built a fire to cook over and play with and climbed up on the big rocks some just looking at the stars; really the first good view of the sky at night on the trip. The desert gets so hot so fast I had to get up at 7 AM and out of the tent because it was already baking in there. And we went on down the road out towards Route 8 and San Diego.

We've spent a lot of time in San Diego on the beach. PB, Pacific Beach, is where we've been mostly. A pretty good beach, and in San Diego in general, not just at the beach, there are camper vans everywhere. There seems to be no real regulation on how long you can park most places (except for when they sweep the streets once a month) so we have been able to just park in the same spot a few blocks from the beach, sleeping in the van, leaving it there as home base during the day too. Looks like that's not an uncommon strategy either. I've been just swimming and fooling around with a skimboard and reading books all day on the beach, but I'm toying with the idea of just buying a surfboard for the trip up the coast and trying to get better than my few "holy shit I stood up!" moments I've had trying to surf in the past. That'd be fun.



So yesterday night we took a little jaunt over into Tijuana because everyone said it was dangerous and it sounded kind of fun. It was fun, but we didn't know our way around and on a Sunday night all the tourist shops close at like 7 and it gets weird fast. Not to mention the whole weirdness of being in Mexico where your waiter offers you cerveza, then tequila, then cocaine, viagra, and hookers or some Xanax for dessert. The law is just kind of a rough guideline there I guess, but it makes things more exciting. And those little kids trying to sell you chiclets all over the place. So we got a cab and Robert whipped out his skills of Espanol and got us to a restaurant with Mexican food (imagine that). Not as greasy and sketchy as we wanted really, but close enough.

Unfortunately we had already had some tequilas and were not really paying attention to where the cab went, so instead of paying $4 for a ride back to the border we decided to figure it out. And we did, after an hour wandering around looking for walls Robert asking questions to some Mexicans and running across highways and ditches and whatever else was there. And we found the border with a huge line leading out from it all cars trying to get back to the good old USA, but we just walked right thru, no problem and got the train back to San Diego from San Ysidro with some schizophrenic man who was really excited about the Mexico jacket he had just haggled a vendor down from $40 to $36 for, and a guy my age from Orange County giving us advice about where to go after I told him I didn't want to buy a gold chain from him because I'd look like an idiot.




As it turned out the timing worked out and my dad ended up in San Diego on business for 3 days when we're here. So we met him for some sushi in the Gaslamp Quarter downtown in San Diego, really great sushi with one old Japanese guy making everything for the whole restaurant and yelling out at people sitting at the counter in his Japanese accent about how spicy they wanted the spicy tuna. So I get to sleep in a bed tonight in my dad's hotel room courtesy of the Dept. of Defense and the US Navy (thanks for the continental breakfast and showers too!); first bed I've slept in since Colorado about 2 weeks ago and first shower (unless you count the ocean) since Phoenix last Wednesday. The beach isn't a bad place to be homeless tho, you have the ocean, public bathrooms and sometimes showers, and you can sleep on the beach or park free in the street at night, turns out the cops don't even care, they pulled up one night (when we were pretty drunk in the van) and we were afraid we'd have to move or something but they just checked the plates and left us alone.

Day 31, 4715mi, 42 tacos eaten

Across the Divide and into the desert

This is the Great Sand Dunes National Park in this picture here. There's a little stream that comes down nice and cold only in the spring from the snowmelt and people swim in it. Bizarre scene really, basically a beach, huge sand dunes, and in the background snow-covered mountains at 14,000ft. We climbed up to the highest one barefoot; nice to have that warm but not hot sand to walk in, and a lot more fun to jump downhill than going up. So we parked the van in a Comfort Inn parking lot, ready to finally go over the Continental Divide in the morning.

Crossing over the divide at around 10,000ft on the way to Durango the trees changed pretty instantly. Aspens and Cottonwoods now besides just the pines like it is on the East of the Divide. Well we got into Durango and after a while of biking around town I went for a run. This was at somewhere over 7,000ft but somehow the first run I really felt good on. Maybe I finally adapted to the altitude from the 2 weeks in Denver, or maybe I just can't deal with morning runs... Either way it was good to be back running fast again without feeling like I might collapse after 20 minutes.

Mesa Verde is a weird National Park, because, while most National Parks are devoted to various natural wonders, meant as spaces not to be developed, untouched by the hand of man, the entire idea of Mesa Verde is these man-made cliff houses from the 1200's a National Park. Not that it wasn't an amazing place, but a brick house built in the 13th century hardly merits a monument on any other continent. We took a tour of the "Balcony House" led by a Ranger but they let you walk all around and in the buildings, just as long as you don't touch the walls. There was a 32-foot ladder (they were always very specific about the 32-feet part of it) you had to climb and a little hole of a tunnel to crawl through at one point. There are hundreds of these cliff dwellings around, but after you see a few, your mind gets saturated with pueblos for a while and you go.



Out of here we headed into the Ute Reservation and then into the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico. We stopped for gas here and a Navajo man pumping gas into his truck in front of us started asking about our trip. He said he liked Virginia and he saw our license plate, said it was like Germany. I told him it's close but less snow and less Germans generally. We asked him where to eat but he said everything here in this town is closed we should go over to Farmington. He told us a little about the Reservation, how it was the biggest because the Navajo Nation would never sell off their land. He said if he had more time he'd show us around. "In Virginia you have hicks, like 'rednecks', right? Well here I'm a real Red redneck" I got a kick out of that. He welcomed us and we took off towards Santa Fe.

Tearing pretty fast out of Santa Fe, a clusterfuck of fake adobe, Indian jewelery, tourists, and art, we needed to stop for gas since the trip odometer hit 300mi an the van gas gauge doesn't work anymore. I pulled around to a cheap gas station on an Indian Reservation and Robert filled up the gas. He had to go inside to get the free 12oz. Coke they give you with a tank of gas and there was me, pulled around on the other side of the pump towards the road waiting for him, just thinking about some strange dream I'd had the night before and how I needed to let go of trying to control everything that happened to me so much so I could just live and enjoy it more, and me just kind of staring out the window in the mirrors looking at a girl in a white dress and a hat with a dog waiting for Robert and wondering what was going on inside her head under that hat. He came back with his Coke and I drove out of there pushing the van pretty hard. It was a hot day, so the van would get to the point of overheating in the desert there every hour or so. We stopped at casinos along the way to let it cool and I won four and a half dollars at one and lost twenty at the next. Time to get to Arizona.

Right when you come into Arizona on Interstate 40, you go into the Petrified Forest so we checked it out. Some badlands and strangle piles of petrified wood that looks like it's been chopped up by someone, but since it's made of stone that's unlikely. They had signs everywhere telling you not to "collect" the wood or take it with you and the Rangers would ask you if you had any wood on you, and they even had an incredibly boring 20 minute video that ended with a man getting arrested for taking some wood out of the park. Really I didn't want this petrified wood that much, or at all; I didn't really get why anyone would, so I left it alone.


So here we have to fill up with gas again somewhere in Holbrook, AZ and it's the old mechanical pump and you can even pump you gas before you pay, right off of old Route 66 near the Wigwam hotels. We run into the grocery store to get something to cook up for dinner and some beer, and when we come out this old drunk Indian comes up and starts asking about where we've been and where we're going. He was interested but seemed like he was more interested in the four and a half dollars I had in my pocket from earlier. So he prayed for us in Navajo, all is going good, but then he decided that wasn't enough and he needed to inform me that I didn't believe in anything not even myself and unless I did something about it I would be cursed to death. I told him I knew better than he did about that and I believed in myself just fine, and besides I was the only one who could do anything about it anyway. He told me he was a medicine man and knew he was the only one who could help me, and then he asked me for a dollar. I said "hell no I'm not giving you a dollar, you just cursed me, that's not really the way to go about it" and then Robert gave him a dollar. I got in the van and asked Robert what he did that for, and then we took off to find somewhere to stop for the night.

Day 26, 3885mi, 1 oil change