For someone who makes perfect fluffy bunny pancakes, Sysguy is awfully adverse to having his picture taken.
In true atheist fashion, we’re celebrating the arrival of spring with the time honored egg hunt and candy freakout. The Things enjoyed themselves immensely, starting at oh’dark-thirty, and were quite pleased with their stuffed plushy chocolate-colored bunnies. Their parents got stuck buying chocolate bunnies from the school. The Easter bunny is feeling clever for finding the stuffed ones.
It’s nice to wrap up spring break with a holiday, it puts a big fat bow on what has been a lovely week.
Here are the Things, indulging in some aprés camp set-up rough housing. Sigh. The first of several days of this sort of thing. I was basically insane by the time we drove home. The campground (Black Rock) was lovely. We got a spot directly across from the bathrooms, which is handy when you have members of your party who like to wait till they’re dancing before taking care of business. Ahem.
The Joshua trees are very interesting looking, and in some places there are so many of them it really is a Dr. Seuss forest. Just without much else in the way of obvious life.
Fortunately, he was pretty easygoing, except for the ghastly stink cloud he loosed whenever we got too friendly. We spent a fair amount of time watching him negotiate the gravel to go to and fro. His locomotion was comical.
On the second day, we drove to the federal part of the park to visit the Joshua Tree Reserve proper, which was a really surreal landscape of Joshua tree forest as far as you could see. I forgot to take a picture of that. Oops.
The ranger explained that the giant rocks are igneous rocks pushed up into the metamorphic rock (called pica nice) that was above it (yeah, who knew). So the surrounding hillsides were made of this pica nice, and the whole area used to be covered with them, but erosion has made them disappear, and what we’re left with are these big igneous boulders that had pushed up below it. And the rock climbers of the world rejoiced. The pica nice is still disappearing, too. Yay! More boulders coming soon!
You know, in a couple hundred thousand years or so.
Up at the top, we had a mediocre expensive lunch (I recommend bringing a basket if you go.) and took a long hike. It was about 36° on top of the mountain, which the Things are totally not used to. I did tell them to wear warm clothes, but would they listen? Nope. I could have made them change, but why blow a good learning experience?
There was a fair amount of old icy snow in all the shady nooks and crannies, and our snow-deprived Things attempted to dig sticks into each and every one of them. It was hilarious. We really should visit Winter one of these days. We walked around for a couple of hours, moving and sunshine made the chill much less noticeable.
Thing 2 had a heck of a time keeping that big horse from eating his way down the trail. His arms aren’t really long enough to yank the reins up and get the horse’s attention, he’s not big enough to really jam his heels in very hard; Ed knew damn well there was practically no weight up there, so no worries. Eventually, the guide asked me to move my horse right up into Ed’s backside. Then my horse bit him. This was apparently the intent. It got Ed’s attention, but didn’t really seem to bother him, other then getting him to move along. Thing 1 had the perfect trail horse, nice and steady. Fling tried to fling me once, and was clearly disdainful of my horsemanship.
Probably rightly so.
Then, we went home sweet home. With the comfy chairs and tall ceilings. Ahhh.
All in all it was a delightful if exhausting (for me) trip. We’re home, the laundry is done and school is back in session. Whew.
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