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