4 Days in Joshua Tree and Arizona
While we officially kicked off our US and Canada road trip with a few days in LA, we were visiting a lot of friends and family so it still felt like home to us. After LA, we headed to Joshua Tree where we were going to explore the surrounding areas, stay a night at an Airbnb, and explore the park the following day.
Day 1: Pioneertown and Joshua Tree
Our first stop before heading to our Airbnb was Pioneertown. It’s a tiny old western town that was used as a filming location for many movies. It has a handful of small eateries and bars, but many are not open on Mondays so we were only able to sit down for a quick lunch at Red Dog Saloon.
After lunch, we walked around the town which was so small it probably took about 15 minutes. We saw some western-themed buildings, some small stores, funny cacti (one of them was actually the town mayor), and even a tumbleweed eerily rolling by like the ones you see in the movies.
For the rest of the day, we drove through the town of Joshua Tree and quickly visited a gift shop before heading to our hotel to rest. We grabbed some groceries (more details in future posts on what we’re eating while on the road) and worked out in the hotel gym. We went to sleep early because we planned on waking up early to catch sunrise in Joshua Tree National Park the following morning.
Day 2: Joshua Tree National Park
We wanted to catch the sunrise but got to the park around 5:45am, which was a bit too late for pink sky photos. It was still a beautiful drive into the park.
We first stopped at the Cholla Cactus Garden to take some pictures. Honestly don’t have much to say about them other than there were a lot of cacti and although they look fuzzy from afar, they are actually filled with spikes. They are “jumping cactus” because they so quickly latch onto things passing by that it looks like they’re jumping. We both left the garden with a bunch of spikes stuck to the bottom soles of our shoes and they were fairly difficult to remove (but we did it eventually!).
Next, we continued along Park Boulevard which is a scenic driving route inside the park. We headed to Arch Rock where we did a small hike around the area. There are signs that tell you that Arch Rock can be easy to miss and that definitely was the case for us. We finally found it after walking around in a circles a few times. To be honest, there were a lot of rock formations and many of them looked cooler than Arch Rock did. And then after a while they do mostly begin to look the same, so we decided to stay in our car for the rest of the driving route and see the sights from afar.
Once we finished up at the park, we drove to Arizona which took about 5 hours. We stopped for dinner groceries once we reached Phoenix and then checked into our hotel.
We stayed at a nice golf resort and I remember being surprised that it was much more affordable than a lot of other hotels in the area. The catch became obvious once we were waiting to check in and I saw a separate “vacations” desk pulling guests over once they completed check in. As much as we tried to avoid it, we had to listen to their spiel about how we could be gifted future booking credit at their properties if we attend a 90-minute presentation the following morning. If it’s not obvious by now, they’re trying to sell timeshares. Despite cornering us into a refundable security deposit, we weren’t interested in a timeshare. And we later read that we wouldn’t have been eligible anyway since we both needed to be employed full-time. We did get a bottle of wine and two bags of Gardettos out of it, though.
Day 3: Phoenix and Scottsdale
The person who spoke to us about the booking credit gift said we only had to stay at the presentation for 15 minutes to claim the gift so we went to try to get that. It was a long shot but we don’t have jobs and tried anyway. To no one’s surprise, the people at the presentation said that we were given inaccurate information. So we just asked for our deposit back and left.
Today was going to be a chill one since the next day we’d be driving to Texas. We drove to Scottsdale and wandered around Old Town. It was larger than I expected it to be and had a lot of shops and eateries. It was midday on a weekday so it wasn’t as lively as I imagine evenings and nights to be, but we still thought it was a cute part of town.
The rest of the day was spent cooling off by the pool. We have a long drive through Texas coming up so it’s nice to have some downtime when we can.
Day 4: Saguaro National Park
We decided last minute to check out Saguaro National Park on our way out of the Phoenix area and to El Paso. The park is split up into two sections, east and west, and are located on opposite sides of Tucson. In the interest of time, we chose to only visit the west side since it was supposed to be more dense than the east side. The east side has much larger, but fewer cacti.
It was so worth it and we’re glad we spent some time there. Saguaros are giant and their shape is what you’d imagine as the quintessential cactus. Think: the cactus emoji. Similar to what we did in Joshua Tree, we drove along a scenic route and got out once for a short hike. It was scorching hot so the decision was easy!
Now, we have a 6 hour drive to our next state… Texas!