Southern California

Winter 2024/25 Review and 2025/26 Preview
(Where we’ve been and where we’re going!)

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Winter 2024/25 Review and 2025/26 Preview(Where we’ve been and where we’re going!)

Where we’ve been and where we’re going!

For the third year in a row, we spent winter 2024/2025 at Mayflower County Park near Blythe, California amongst old and new RVing friends. We arrived in early December 2024 after spending summer and fall on the west coast gradually making our way south through Washington, Oregon, and California with some great stops along the way. Pictures from our winter stay at Mayflower are provided at the end of this post. Our days at Mayflower were filled with walks around the nearby Palo Verde Ecological Preserve, walking the dogs in the park, monthly potlucks and ice cream socials, surprisingly competitive lawn bowling, discussions and reminiscences around the evening firepit, and trips to Blythe and Quartzite. This winter we also visited the Blythe Intaglios for the first time. These are a fascinating group of well-preserved geoglyphs that were created by humans for an as-yet-unknown reason, but clearly had a meaningful purpose for those that did create them.

We stayed at Mayflower County Park in our new 30-ft Grand Design Transcend 240ML travel trailer while our 5th wheel was being repaired. Our winter stay lasted for about 3-months before we headed to Casa Grande, Arizona for a couple of weeks in early March 2025. By then we received word that our 5th wheel repairs were complete in Arroyo Grande, California (San Luis Obispo County), so we schedule a few stops along the 400-mile trip to pick up the 5th wheel in late March 2025.

The 5th wheel repairs were done by Mullahey Collision & RV Service Center, and we were very happy with their work. They did a great job of the bodywork and interior repairs, including replacing the three-way refrigerator workings and completely rebuilding the kitchen slide and pantry. Fortunately, the repairs were fully covered by Progressive Insurance, and Mullahey did a great job of coordinating insurance company approvals for all of the work.

We had originally planned to switch back into the 5th wheel and store the new trailer for our upcoming trip, but after a few months of living in the new trailer we decided, instead, to take it on our trip and store the 5th wheel. We figured there would be some tight roads and campgrounds as we head to the east coast, and the smaller trailer will make travel easier and give us more flexibility on where we can stay.

Since putting the 5th wheel in storage in late March, we’re now officially on our “east coast trip”. The highlight of the year is going to be seeing fall colors in the US Northeast, and then traveling from north to south through most of the east coast states with a plan to spend winter 2025/2026 in Florida. As we get into 2026 we plan to spend spring and summer in the southern states visiting some of Allen’s family and then head up through the Midwest states through late summer, finally looping to the south through Colorado, and making our way back to Southern California by late 2026. That’s a big trip, and if we follow the current plan, we will have RVed through all 48 contiguous states by the time we complete it. The picture shows a map of our planned 2025/2026 trip.

At the time of this post (late April 2025), we’re in Tennessee. Since leaving California in late March, we’ve stayed in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. A recent highlight of our travels was a visit to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, and we will post a separate description of that visit on our blog.

Joshua Tree National Park

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Joshua Tree National Park

While the Joshua Tree area has been inhabited by humans for at least 10,000 years, by the late 1920s the development of new roads into the desert had brought an influx of land developers and cactus poachers. Minerva Hoyt, a Pasadena resident who was extremely fond of desert plants, became concerned about the removal of cacti and other plants to the gardens of Los Angeles. Her tireless efforts to protect this area culminated in 825,000 acres being set aside as Joshua Tree National Monument in 1936. As part of the Desert Protection Bill, Joshua Tree National Monument was elevated to National Park status on October 31, 1994. The bill also added 234,000 acres. Elevations in the park range from a low of 536 feet to a high of 5,814 feet at Quail Mountain.

We visited Joshua Tree National Park in late November 2024 while staying at the Thousand Trails Palm Springs RV Park in Palm Desert, California. We entered the park at the Cottonwood entrance at its southeast side, stopping at the small visitor center on the way. Following Pinto Basin Road to Park Boulevard generally took us from the southeast side of the park to the northwest side, eventually exiting at the West Entrance Station.

While we had visited Joshua Tree a number of times over the years, this was our first time driving the full length of the park and we got to appreciate the wide variety of scenery and ecosystems that exist in addition to the famous Joshua Trees that everyone associates with the park. There are three unique ecosystems within the park. As we entered at the southeast side, we found ourselves in the Colorado Desert that was characterized by stands of spike-like ocotillo plants and “jumping” cholla cactus. We stopped at the Cholla Cactus Garden which includes a flat 0.25-mile loop trail. We walked through a section of the thousands of teddy bear cholla cactus with a backdrop of distant mountain views.

As we continued along the road, we passed from the Colorado Desert into the southern boundary of the Mojave Desert which reaches across the northern part of the park. This is the habitat that includes the park’s namesake: the Joshua tree. We stopped at several areas along the road where there were many photo-ops. Along the way we pulled into the Live Oak Picnic area, driving a short distance on dirt roads to a secluded spot among the Joshua Trees and rock formations to enjoy a late picnic lunch as the sun was low in the sky on this short winter day. As we drove out of the park at its northwestern side, we got glimpses of Joshua Tree’s third ecosystem where the Little San Bernardino Mountains provide habitat for a community of California juniper and pinyon pine above 4,000 feet.

Our half-day visit to Joshua Tree was an enjoyable trip through the variety of ecosystems, geological features, and plants to inhabit the park, and we learned there was more to the park than just the eponymous Joshua Tree plants.

Photos of our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.

 

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