The desert.  In my dreams, it’s transcendent, an endless landscape of otherworldly experiences, blooming cacti, glowing scorpions, hot springs, and lucid dreams.  Last March, in the throes of the kids’ Spring Break, we set off in search off all those things, finding instead exhaustion, sun fatigue, scorpions poised to bite flip-flopped feet, hot springs seeded with rattlesnakes dripping from the trees…and transcendence. But not the kind you stumble into.  The kind you earn.  Let me tell you about our Desert Trip.

I planned this trip for weeks.  I planned the trip loosely around Route 66, looking along the way for giant tortoise preserves, ghost towns, UFO landing sights, national monuments, hot springs, wolf packs, old-fashioned milkshakes, Route 66 memorabilia, and natural history.  The tricky part was finding a place to sleep every night, driving distance between wonderful things.  We towed our canned ham, The Happy Camper, so that we had a place to escape the elements and rest our weary heads. We knew that friends would meet us at Joshua Tree.  Until then, we were on our own, riders on the storm.  We had two tweens in tow and a three-year-old.  Eben and I were fresh off of months of work, looking for a vacation, relief from the grind, maybe an umbrella drink.  That’s not quite what we found.

We spent our first day of highway travel looking for a porta-potty enclosure. We dreamed of boondocking in some remote corner of paradise, and The Happy Camber lacks a toilet and graywater system.  We found a Walmart and a surly fish license salesman who led me to a squalid plastic tote bag promising a toilet tent inside.  We bought it for some outlandish amount of money, along with water, coffee, tortillas, and canned beans. We set off from Bakerfield into the mountains, following the trains as they winded and whistled deep into the hills, chasing storm clouds across Tehachapi Pass.  We landed in the middle of the night in a desolate campground east of nowhere.  Despite the late hour and RV-ers sleeping on all sides, the kids scrambled up a dirt mountain and howled at the moon before finally settling into a fitful sleep. Come morning, they were ready to look for ghosts.  

Calico Ghost Town is a former mining town in the Mojave Desert that had its heyday in 1881, when it was teeming with silver.  Now, the town is a county park with a nicely-preserved main street set on a desert plateau in a picturesque mountain range scarred by mines.  A small camping area lays at the foot of the town, across the way from an old graveyard.  Local lore promises the town is teeming with active ghosts—miners still looking for silver, a spectral cat, and wayward children in dungarees.  Calico was all that it promised, with ghost stories, living history, and a handful of strange experiences we’ll never forget.  After a day of mine tours, sarsaparilla, and exploring rickety old buildings, we hired local storytellers to give us a private ghost tour of the town as the sun dipped below the horizon and the moon began to rise.  These were raconteurs of the old school variety, who incorporated every creak, shiver and grown into their lurid yarns, until we were all huddling a little bit closer lest we get bewitched by the spirits of loose women and lost boys. Transcendent.

From there, things got tricky.  Joshua Tree National Park was full to overflowing so we ended up at an outskirts hipcamp, populated by world travelers, run by a hyper skateboarder brimming with hospitality and lavender-scented latrines.  Driving across the park felt like finning across an underwater coral reef, teeming with barrel cacti, blooming ocotillo, fissured canyons, washed out ravines, and Joshua Trees.  We looked for big cats, mountain goats and coyote as we scanned the horizon, finding only hikers, birds, and campgrounds packed tent-to-tent with Spring breakers.

From there, we made our way to Anza-Borrego Desert via the Salton Sea, experiencing night hikes rife with glowing scorpions, gale force winds, and windswept dinners, seasoned by dust.  We flirted with the idea of visiting a remote hot spring off some dirt road in the middle of nowhere before doing a little recon indicating it was likely a human trafficking site with warmish water and rattlesnakes dripping from the trees.  Instead, we kept driving and driving and driving.  We wandered into the Outlaw 500 Desert Rally, surrounded by oddities like a motorcycle designed to look like a jet ski manned by a one-eyed pirate. Not to mention the Salton Sea itself. a shallow, saline lake positioned directly on the San Andreas Fault, sprawling across the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, smelling faintly of sea birds, rotten eggs, and brine. It’s a no-man’s land where anything goes yet nothing seems to be happening, until you stumble into a colony of rotted-out antique cars, bright graffiti, and scrap metal sculptures fanning across the sand. It’s at once dystopian, apocolyptic, and strangely inspiring—a place on the brink of becoming a place or recovering from once being one.

We left the Salton Sea behind in search of something less complicated. We boondocked for the first time the night before Easter, putting the porta-potty to good use behind a blooming ocotillo under a waxing moon in the Anza-Borrego Desert.  The Easter bunny came, leaving glowing Easter eggs among blooming succulents and mounds of bones.  Transcendent.  But you can’t boondock forever.  In the still, calm perfection of a private glampsite, one wonders what else is out there?  Maybe there is something even better than this. We set out to find it, checking in to our campsite at Agua Caliente County Park in search of fresh wonders.

I’m a big fan of Agua Caliente, which is just east of Julian, to the west of the Anza-Borrega Desert.  The park offers 50s-style car and RV camping and a few basic tent cabins in a desolate desert with swimming pools full of chlorinated mineral water.  Our kids treat the campground like suburbia, fanning out on bikes in search of children, and then packing up to explore each other’s campsites, bike the trails, and coax adults into supervising popsicle runs to the country store and frequent swims.  I like the languid pace—rest, sleep, and swim during the day, hike and play at night.  You meet random people, an outdoorsy couple with a Jeep full of rowdy boys whose names all start with J, a retired pediatrician with two freckled grand-children who become your kid’s faithful pen-pals.  You devise new cocktails out of whatever you have left at The Happy Camper before biking to the store for another popsicle.

Our friends did not have a canned ham, however.  They had a tent that was getting blown to bits by the desert wind. They were sunburned and sand-sore.  They wanted flowing, fresh water, not chlorinated, hot spring pools.  So, we reluctantly left our desert oasis, driving for miles across the desert. 

We passed enormous mining operations hidden in mountains surrounded by acres of barbed wire and surveillance cameras. We skirted the border, marveling at the road-side stashes of water left for migrants who hadn’t planned to walk quite this far, in weather quite this hot, with no water for miles.  One such stash was festooned with a cardboard banner, exclaiming “Ola Bola! You’ve Got This!” a phrase we tried to decode for miles before finally adopting it as a hopeful mantra, whatever it may mean.

Desperate to stop driving, we sought relief briefly along the Colorado River in Quartzite at a sad, little trailer park full of aged RVs and tiny homes.  We made pasta on an electric stove.  We all became rock hounds for a minute, scouring the rock shops for the perfect crystal, gazing mournfully at the dirty river, too rapid for proper swimming.  Pizza and gin-and-tonics at Silly Al’s Pizza fortified us for the next leg of our journey, not to mention cars brimming with desert-charged crystals.  We were officially lost now, with no itinerary and just a few ideas, either heading east or west or north or south depending on who was leading, the deadline of school starting lurking in the not-too-distant future, none too convinced we’d make it back.

Still in search of a suitable swimming hole, we made our way to the London Bridge at Lake Havasu via a beautiful, little campground with a sandy beach, perfect for languorous picnics and swims.  We shared tacos and margaritas on the beach with some acquaintances who just happened to pull up from California in one of those serendipitous moments that only happen after days of sleep-deprived wandering.  They shared our campground, hatching a Tepui for a quick slumber before heading on their way to wherever. Transcendent.  We tried to water ski on the lake, ending up sunburned and beached on a shoal.  We ate Mexican food overlooking the London Bridge and a lake full of Spring break revelers with monster boats and string bikinis.  When we had our fill, we packed up The Happy Camper and made our way home, sore and smarting from the wind, the hot, the cold, the loneliness, the companionship, the bitterness, the beauty and the (hard-won) joy.

I remembered this trip tonight, as my mother-in-law longed to see the desert in bloom over fried rice, red wine, and See’s Candy left-over from Valentine’s Day.  She noted that she needs electricity, water, and basic comforts on such a trip.  Scanning my memory of our Desert Trip, I remembered none of those things.  There were other things, marvelous things, but comfort was not among them.  My fingers raced across the keys, looking for a B&B, lodge or resort that would give her the best of the desert without the underbelly, without the humbling parts that leave you smarting.  And I found nothing.  Is the desert really just like that?  All or nothing? Go big or go home?  Perhaps one of you has found the sweet spot, a calm oasis in the storm, suitable for several generations. Drop your knowledge.  Desert blooms a must.  Hot water please, preferably from a hot spring or two.  Ghosts optional but appreciated. 

To visit Happy Cabin during your trip to North Lake Tahoe / Tahoe Vista / Kings Beach, click here.