Month: March 2015

Today we left Portland, Oregon heading toward The Grand Canyon (we have reservations in Trailer Village starting Friday for a week).  We travelled down the Columbia River Gorge (aka “The Gorge”) on route 84 toward Eastern Oregon and eventually Idaho.

 

 

Good-bye Mount Hood (as seen in rear-view mirror)

 

 

Some sights along the way

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And we arrived in Idaho

 

 

My daughter Kathy, a graduate student at Portland State University, has spring break this week and we decided to change plans and drive to Oregon to visit with her for a few days. We picked her up in Portland and headed out the Boardman, OR on the Columbia River. We are staying in a beautiful little park, Boardman Marina & RV Park (note Kathy’s tent next to the fence).

 

 

 

 

It rained most of the day yesterday so went to visit Kennewick, WA – had lunch at Ice Harbor Brewing Company.

 

 

Weather was nice enough at the end of the day to give us a beautiful sunset.

 

 

Sun is out today and I took a long walk in the park.

 

 

 

Enjoying life!!

This post is a bit late but just wanted to keep things in chronological order.

Last week we visited Sky Valley Resort in Desert Hot Springs, CA. Their claim to fame is natural hot springs and they offer numerous swimming pools and spas with naturally heated clear mineral rich water.

It was really more of a mobile home park with a very small number of RV sites. The first site they gave us was on a busy corner next to a construction area. But we asked for a better site and they accommodated. The site we ended up with was pretty nice but it was still a mobile home park and not really a campground.

We visited Thousand Palms Oasis Preserve just a few miles down the road from the ‘campground’. We had a nice nature walk and what we discovered was that the reason there are hot springs in that location is that it is smack on top of the San Andreas fault. The hot water in the swimming pools and spas are is coming up through a giant crack in the earth. We looked at a map and figured if California sunk into the ocean while we were there that we were on the surviving side 🙂

Back to Joshua Tree National Park today. We took a hike on ‘Split Rock’ trail, a 2 mile loop.  The picture below explains the name.

We hiked in the morning while it was still cool. It was starting to warm up by the time we finished. I cannot imagine what it must be like to visit in the summer.

We saw a few rocks that looked like other things.

 

 

 

I love seeing the plants in the desert. I think it’s because they are so different from what we have in New England.

 

 

 

 

And a critter.  We have seen very few animals during our national park visits so far. Hopefully we’ll see more in the future.

 

All in all a good hike and a very nice day!