Other road trip vacations in recent years have acquired names, or should I say Names -- capitalized designator phrases that later loom large in the collective family imagination. Tour of the West took us on a grand loop through scenic parts of UT, touching on parts of CA, NV, CO, and AZ on the way (and was also reminiscent of a family vacation of my childhood also referred to as Tour of the West). Tour of the Volcanoes followed the spine of Cascade Volcanoes up toward my parents' place. These were obvious Names that easily fell into our conversational lexicon.
No such obvious name made itself known for this trip. This year's route was sort of like Tour of the West, but slightly further south. Tour of the Southwest didn't have a good ring to it, and sounded too much like Tour of the West, but we lacked imagination and started calling it Tour of the Southwest anyway while searching for a better name. Never found a better name, so Southwest it is. Or maybe I should make an acronym. TotSW? Now I really want it to be TOWS. Even though we weren't actually towing anything; the gear was all strapped on top. We could have called it Tour of New Mexico, as exploring the area around Santa Fe is what kicked off the whole notion for this vacation, but New Mexico is a long way off, and as plans developed it became clear that there were many non-New Mexico places we were going to explore. Tour of Southern California Mojave Flagstaff Arizona New Mexico Santa Fe Grand Canyon Cliff Dwellings Lava Tubes Desert Mountains Canyons Rivers Extravaganza? ToSCMFANMSFGCCDLTDMCRE.
Hopeless. Stick with Tour of the Southwest. Don't want to type that a billion times, so TotSW for short.
Incidentally, we ended up following what is essentially old Route 66 and the route of the Santa Fe Railway most of the way over. Not on purpose, but just because the route makes sense geographically, which is why the railway and roads were built where they were. ToR66? Nope. Sticking with TotSW.
As is often the case with these trips, the first day was mostly driving before the play started. After all, one does things within an easy day's drive of home on a more regular basis and we wanted to go new places. So the first day was relatively long and uneventful; we listened to an excellent podcast to fill the time. (Bundyville, from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Highly worth listening to both seasons from the beginning if you like this sort of thing; the journalist has done a brilliant job on this one -- but it's structured as a narrative so make sure you listen to them in chronological order.)
Shiny clean truck at the beginning of the trip, with extra gas cans ready to be filled.
By the time we filled up again later in the day, the windshield was full of bugs. No more clean truck for the rest of the trip. (Dino gas always reminds us of vacations. We like dinosaurs.)
Our destination for the evening (and the next couple of days) was the Mojave National Preserve, chosen because it was an intriguing-looking blob on the map that I had never visited. And it was a (long) day's drive from home in the general direction of Santa Fe. We had to stop in Baker before heading into the park to make sure that all gas vessels were full, as the preserve is large, full of 4WD dirt roads to explore, and doesn't have any gas stations in it.
There is an excellent field of joshua trees on the edge of Cima Dome on the way in. Parts of this preserve have a higher density of Joshua trees than does Joshua Tree National Park.
Long straight railway in the late afternoon light. At this point, we were itching to find a good place to camp because we were hungry and didn't want to be setting things up in the dark.
An hour and half later and several dirt roads later, we found a nice campsite at the Mid-Hills Campground and settled in. Fortunately, at 5600 feet elevation, it was much cooler here than down in Baker.
We slept well this first night, under a very dark sky, looking forward to exploring the desert in the morning.
