Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

Our schedule of being in Riverside for a birthday party and then the Roughneck Rendezvous at Ocotillo Wells a week later left us with some time to fill up. Since we have never been to Phoenix (well, once we drove through it on our way to Sedona), we scheduled three days there to hike and explore.

We made a couple of stops along the way on the drive from Palm Desert to Phoenix. Near the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park we stopped for an earth cache, and then noticed a small sign pointing off down a dirt road to a historical marker, so we had to check that out. During WWII the area was called Camp Young and was used, along with several other desert locations, as a training center for preparing troops for combat in north Africa. A little further east on the freeway we came to the Patton Museum which had a number of tanks and armored vehicles on display outside, as well as Patton memorabilia (I suppose) inside. We just gave it a cursory look from outside the fence.

Near Quartzsite (where snowbirds gather by the thousands), we did another earth cache and a virtual cache at the cemetery. There were so many people at Quartzsite that there was a traffic jam at the first off-ramp.

We arrived at our motel off I17 in the late afternoon, had an early dinner, and went to the movies to see The Hobbit. While I try to research our motels carefully, I didn’t get this one right. We were satisfied with everything but the location. I don’t think I have ever stayed at a motel that was so close to a major freeway, and I was a bit concerned that I needed to use keycard entry on the front door after 7 pm. The mall across the freeway is where we went to see The Hobbit. There were so few cars in the parking lot I thought most of the mall stores were closed (but it still has a Macy’s as an anchor). I think as Phoenix rapidly expanded, this mall lost business to newer malls on the outskirts of town.

Links
—On the way to Phoenix 2013 photo gallery

Last year I attended a geocaching event in the Anza Borrego desert with some friends and had a reasonably good time (I waffle a bit because getting bounced around in the backseat of a Toyota FJ on rough off-road trails is sometimes painful). Since the same event (Roughneck Rendezvous) was being organized this year, I used it as an excuse to plan a 2,000 mile, 2 week trip to visit family, hike and explore new places, and find some geocaches. Plus, I talked Karen into coming along, even though desert conditions are not her favorite thing.

Future posts will describe the places we went and things we did, but here I’ll describe our first weekend, which was an enjoyable time with Karen’s brothers in Riverside and Anaheim. It happened that our visit coincided with Karen’s sister-in-law’s birthday, so we had a great time enjoying that celebration.

Sunday morning we did a geocaching hike before visiting Karen’s older brother in Anaheim. Our objective was Orange County Stash, an old cache hidden in the first year of geocaching, and the oldest cache in Orange County. Trabuco Canyon is an interesting hiking area and is worthy of another visit when we can spend more time.