Thursday, April 7, 2016
We just ended our three month stay in our 'new to us park for 2016'.  We left Superstition Buttes last spring after 10 years there, and started with a new 'family' at Bonita Vista in January of 2016.  It was a good move, and we have enjoyed the many activities and friendly people there.  We will return in December of this year, and stay for four months.  It was time for us to move today, so we went from Apache Junction, AZ to Twentynine Palms, CA.  Of course, it was a busy drive through Phoenix, but once we were on Hwy. 10 west of the city, the traffic became sparse, as well, as the scenery!  We did see a lot of agriculture at the Arizona/California border, but it went back to total desert after that. I'm not sure that we traveled through the Sonoran Desert, that we have in the Valley, but it certainly seems different.  We are south of the Mojave Desert, so I'm thinking we are getting some of that.  It was a non-eventful trip, and we arrived at the 29 Palms Campground at 3:00 p.m.  This will be home for us for a week, and we will explore Joshua Tree National Park from here.  We did some research on the park before we booked our campground, to make sure we were accessible to the more scenic and important features of the park.  We always check with Geo-cache.com to verify our choices.  As it turns out, Joshua Tree National Park has twenty two earthcaches for us to discover and learn about the park.  For those of you non-geo-cachers, people can't hide anything tangible in a national park, but they can have caches that take you to an interesting or geological place of interest, and we will need to answer the questions there to obtain our credit for finding that particular cache.  We hope to be a lot smarter when we leave here! This area is supposed to get some rain tonight and tomorrow, so it might limit what we do tomorrow.  We're fine with that, as they need the rain here so badly!  I really do love it when it rains in the southwest!  I'm going to post some of the pictures I took of our park, and the flowers that are blooming now. 

       This is our site in Bonita Vista.  Note the eagle flag.  We can still have Eagle's Landing in AZ!

 This is a gorgeous flower that we see quite often in the park.  I don't know the name of it, but I'll try to find out.

         This is Hedgehog, and we see it in the desert, when we hike.  It is such a vibrant color.

 The Prickly Pear Flower can be yellow, orange or bright pink.  The yellow ones are the ones we see in the desert.

      This is our clubhouse at Bonita Vista.  The dance hall if on the far right side of the building complex.

 The Saguaro Cactus usually doesn't bloom until April and May, but with the very warm temperatures that we had in February and March, they decided to deliver their beautiful blooms early. 

We are traveling on Hwy. 62, which is north of Joshua Tree National Park.  As you can see, it is very desolate, but we are hoping things change when we get into the park later this week!  We did notice Moon Flowers blooming along this road, which surprised us.  It's mostly scrub brush!