California

Tonight, we are at Emerald Desert RV Park in Palm Desert, CA. We have been coming to this facility for over a year now on just about a monthly basis to visit with the kids and the now one year old grandson. We will be here for two nights at this five star campground and heading back to Wickenburg on Sunday.

While we are relaxing and blogging about being here, getting here was quite another story. We left Bakersfield this morning at about 10:30 AM expecting about a four and one-half hour drive. Alas, when we got to Boron, CA, on the high desert we encountered an extreme traffic jam. When I say extreme, I mean the sort of delay where we went 6.2 miles from Boron to Kramer Junction in an hour and a half. That’s 4⅓ miles per hour on average.

The delay getting past the traffic threw us enough off schedule that when we got to the Inland Empire (San Berdoo, etc.) we were greeted with rush hour slowdowns on I-15, I-215 and I-10. The net result was that we had a late check-in at the campground (office closes at six and we were here at ten after). In spite of all that, we’re relaxed and unwinding from a rather unpleasant commute.

We’re camped in a place called Orange Grove RV Park a bit east of Bakersfield proper. They really do have orange trees throughout the campground, albeit not as dense as one might expect in a commercial orchard. The ladies in the office told us to come back in December when the oranges will be ripe and are free for the picking.

Our itinerary for tomorrow takes us to Palm Desert, CA. We are going to cross over the mountain range east of here through Tehachapi, CA, thence via high desert routing through Kramer Junction and on down through Cajon Pass where we will get on I-10 going toward the low desert.

I labeled the camping day as “A” because this end of the schedule was not as easily numerated as the trip going from Arizona, through Utah and Nevada and on into Central California. I used alpha designators for the last legs of the excursion to keep it simple and flexible for use in the GPS trip planning application while not having to pin down an exact number of days out for a given leg.