#RSRSeesTheUSA Days 21-22: Joshua Tree National Park, CA
I’ve bid my darling friends farewell and camped in Joshua Tree National Park and avoided all information about the Oscars until the flood of text messages that came in today when I came back out of the park.
Some highlights and thoughts from the past two days.
The ability to camp in the park and spend so much time in a place with zero mobile phone service/wifi was really nice. For as much as I do appreciate the ability to be connected digitally, it was a nice “hard line” between bidding my friends goodbye and getting back into the solo traveler zone.
I popped into the Palm Springs Art Museum after dropping friends off at the airport yesterday, and found this most excellent example of art twinning I think I’ve ever seen. The couple in the foreground is alive. The couple in the background is a Duane Hanson sculpture
I’ve missed my writing updates, and I’m glad to get back to them. You know I love an adventure, so the ADVENTURE UNDERWAY keychain I found in Joshua Tree had to come along with me. To that end…
I’ve decided to carry on my trip throughout the next month. I’ve got a project planned in Denver at the end of April, and I’m going to keep on traveling around this side of the country until then. It’s a real test of my tolerance for nomadic life. I don’t have plans beyond a few more days in the desert and then about a week in LA (where I’ve never really spent much time). That still gives me about 3 weeks to play with before Denver. And I really do feel fine about not knowing where I’ll be in those weeks.
I’m looking forward to doing some active planning and plotting about coming work projects. While I do keep falling into my accustomed mental pattern of waiting for a bolt of inspiration to hit me, I’m also able to recognize the false simplicity of that. Yes, I’m figuring out how to work as I move forward. That is happening bit by bit as I go, not in one all-at-once light bulb switching on. Reminder to self that I should keep on listening to this tortoise road sign.
There are a lot of great plants in Joshua Tree National Park, but the one I got the most obsessed with was the ocotillo (previously only known to me as a word that I repeatedly miss in the NYTimes Spelling Bee game). Here, have some pics I took of this gorgeous specimen (and the cactus wren that hung out in its branches for a while).
Clouds of the days: yesterday it was the peachy-rose-violet daub over the campsite at sunset. Today… honestly, today was a day full of great clouds (it rained in the middle of the day out of a lowering gray behemoth of a cloud, and cloud shadows across the park were truly excellent), but I’m going for this abstracted view of the window of my tent as the sun came out this morning.
