Desert Turkey
In our family, we usually spend Thanksgiving with people we love, have a big feast, watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and share things we’re grateful for. We weren’t sure what to expect celebrating Thanksgiving on the road, but it turned out to be a lot of fun! This year the Bernard family met us in Palm Springs, CA and we managed to do basically everything. EXCEPT, we missed the Thanksgiving Day parade. I was really disappointed about that. We tried to watch a recording of it, but they were all absolutely terrible.
On actual Thanksgiving, we visited Joshua Tree National Park. This was not our first time there, but it was fun sharing it with our family. We went on a cool hike where we got to climb on giant rocks and saw Native American drawings (I learned these are called petroglyphs and pictographs). This is why we missed the parade but it was worth it (Grier disagrees).
One day we explored the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation. We were literally in a forest of palm trees! There were a couple of little huts that showed what it might have been like for the indigenous people living there hundreds of years ago. I can see why they would live there because of the shade and fresh water just a few feet away.
Another day we went on the Palm Springs Airial Tramway which took us 2.5 miles up to San Jacinto peak at 8,516 feet elevation (yes, I actually remembered those numbers. Mom didn’t believe me, so she double checked). When we went over the towers it swung like crazy and everyone in the tram would gasp or cheer which made it even more fun.
At the top there was snow! We had snowball fights and built a snow man and even went sledding because someone was so nice and shared their sleds with us. I even saved a baby from being hit by the sled (this was really scary because I thought they were gonna get hurt but they were ok)!
When we were on the tram, going back down, it felt a lot faster. We learned it could go up to 25 miles per hour and hold up to 80 people. The funniest part was that the driver played Free Falling as we went down. This made everyone laugh and mom sang along to the music.
There was an amazing pool at our campground that we went to every single day. It was cool because it was filled by a hot spring and was always warm. It was natural mineral water, so it had this soft, light feel that made me feel like I was swimming in silk.
We did go to a really creepy place called Bombay Beach. It made me super uncomfortable because it was full of kinda falling apart art instillations. Another strange thing was that it was right on the Salton Sea which is crazy. We learned it is manmade by accident!! A long time ago, people were trying to water farms with and they diverted the Colorado River with a canal. There was lots of flooding and in 1905 it caused one of the canal walls to break. This made a lake 45 miles long and 17 miles wide! People thought this was going to be a big vacation spot and started building up hotels and lots of famous people came to stay and do water sports. Then, it started to dry up and basically got abandoned in the 1980s. Now it’s a really big environmental concern because of farm runoff and because how salty it is! After exploring, we stopped at a really beautiful park for a picnic but it was weird that we couldn’t touch the water.
One of the coolest parts was the very last night we were there, we saw a SpaceX rocket take off from Vandenburg Space Force Base carrying StarLink satellites. It looked like an asteroid going the opposite way.
As usual, the best part though was just being with family. Every night Grier, Jack and I had a sleepover in Nana and Pepe’s cabin and Sayer even had his first (and second) sleepover in the trailer with Brennan. We had so much fun playing with our cousins Jack and Brennan and cannot wait until the next visit!
