Heading to warmer climes

Leaving Vancouver, our plan was to drive slowly down to the LA area. And drive slowly we did, with a record time to LA of 3.5 days! But we're not in a hurry. Also we did have a minor detour of driving the great circle route around Washington due to a closure on the I5... During the drive we managed to not eat any fast food - this also might be a record. The US highway system is
pretty good, with rest areas set up every 50 miles or so that have bathrooms, covered picnic tables, running water and even free coffee sometimes. Not surprisingly, the coffee was not up to Megan's standards :). However, we did appreciate being able to cook our own meals at the picnic areas.

We got to LA on Sunday afternoon and found ourselves travelling on a freeway system that had more cars in motion at the same time than perhaps there are cars in total in Vancouver. Yikes. After two hours of neverending freeways, we opted to head straight to Joshua Tree National Park (about due east of Palm Springs) for some peaceful camping and climbing. We'll brave LA traffic for Disneyland next week...

Although Dave has spent considerable time in Joshua Tree, it was Megan's first sight of the park. Wow! Our campsite is nestled in a shallow canyon of brown and gold granite, there is actually a climb right out of our campsite. It's easy to see how people come here and have trouble leaving!



As an example of how plush our camping setup is, we baked a pizza for dinner yesterday. Tonight we're having Megan's signature thai curry. Roughing it? What? Although we do have to eat a bit quickly, since evenings are slightly chilly. Today's temperature ranged from "Dave climbing with no shirt" to "wearing 2 fleeces, a down vest, and a down jacket while playing board games at camp".



Today was our third climbing day, and by far our fullest - we climbed more routes today than the previous two combined. No sense starting off in a hurry when you have 8 months to play...

J-Tree is peaceful and beautiful, very good for the soul. It can be rather hard on the ego, though. 5.4 (a grade that most 5 year olds can climb in Squamish) can be really hard here. Also, Dave toproped and fell off a route he soloed when he was 19. Youth is wasted on the young!

Our plan is for a few more days of climbing, then a brief return to LA (Disneyland!!!) and then ten more days of climbing in J-Tree before driving north to Red Rocks/Vegas to meet Chis, Brock & co. for New Years.