Thursday, May 28, 2009

Weekend Getaways: Joshua Tree (part 1)

Friday, May 22nd

Matt and I decided about a week before the long weekend to take a roadtrip to Phoenix with a stop in Joshua Tree National Park. I left work a little early and hit the road to pick him up from work. It took me quite a while and we didn't wind up leaving until around 4:30 in the afternoon after packing up the car. We decided to wait out traffic and went to Monterey Park to buy food and firewood and also have dinner at Little Fat Sheep.

Little Fat Sheep is a Mongolian hot pot place. I don't know what the difference between Mongolian and Chinese hot pot are, but it seemed pretty similar to me. We ordered the half and half, which is half spicy broth and half original broth. The spicy broth comes on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the spiciest. I ordered a 3 because Matt can't eat spicy. After about 20 minutes, I couldn't eat it anymore either because the broth comes with all of the spices and chilis inside it still and as it boils, it becomes more and more spicy over time. Items we ordered for the soup: sliced beef, beef balls, seafood dumplings, spinach, fried tofu, shittake mushrooms, and handmade noodles. The beef balls were terrible but everything else was pretty good. Best items were definitely the noodles and dumplings! Yummy!

After dinner, we made a quick stop to Quickly for boba before hitting the road again.

By the time we reached Joshua Tree, it was obviously nighttime. We didn't make reservations for a campsite and it was already very late in the night, so we had to ask the park ranger which campsite we should try. She told us that we would probably have the best luck at Jumbo Rocks, which is basically smack dab in the middle of the park. The national park is much much larger than I was expecting it to be. We had to drive 17 miles to the campsite, but along the way, there were tons and tons of joshua trees along the road. Although it was dark, you could still see many of them as well as the giant boulders behind them. Whoever says there aren't any more joshua trees in the park is lying. It was a beautiful sight and I wished we were seeing this area during daylight hours because we were not intending to return this way the next day.

We finally reached Jumbo Rocks. It is actually the largest campground with 124 campsites. We found a few open ones and finally decided on number 26, which was located in front of a large boulder. Good for me to pee behind in the middle of the night. We unpacked the car, made a campfire, built the tent, roasted s'mores and hit the sack.

Things we had for camping:
2 sleeping bags
1 air mattress
1 tent
3 starter logs
1 bundle of firewood
2 flashlights
Metal skewers
1 cooler of food from breakfast and s'more making materials
Lots of water


Campfire


Campfire at our campsite

Little Fat Sheep
120 S Atlantic Blvd
Monterey Park
, CA 91754

Quickly
1328 E Valley Blvd
Alhambra
, CA 91801