Wednesday 5.8. (Joshua Tree)

The heat from the morning sun wakes us up and so we start todays jurney pretty early. We camp at the southern part of the park and now we continue northeast, where the real Joshua tree starts to appear, as well as groupings of rock formations typical for this park (often resembling faces and are also named by what they resemble). It is extremely hot (later in the afternoon we have 47) and clear day, so that we limit hiking only to a few short walks on the marked trails (in between the cactuses, Joshua trees and the rocks). In the car we cool down, so that the park looks more fair to us -- only few people and the nature is nice. We try to get to the pond (or a lake) advised by the guide, but there is no water at all (only few mices and rattle snakes live below the rocks). We drive through the whole park and get to its northern border, which is practically empty and straight road (very much preffered to the highway); we stop for the lunch and drive down to the Arizona toward Phoenix (gas price falls by 30 cents per gallon, we are away from California). Along the way we see several wind devils which look like small tornados. In the evening, we are glad that we arrived to Chuck.