Joshua Tree National Park

The ride out of L.A. was simple enough; lots of expansive swaths of highway and traffic congestion. Fortunately we were on the non-congested side, heading out of the city and into the desert-y rural areas of California. After a mix up detour and turnaround, we made it to Indio and grabbed some groceries for our camping stay at Joshua Tree. We checked in and drove out to one of the camp sites, set up camp and did some exploring. There are a number of large rock formations you can climb about on.














Evil cholla







During the night coyotes wandered through the camp. At first I thought it was someone chanting outside the tent, what with the weird rhythmic panting they were doing but then they began their trademark yipping.

The moon was full and so bright that I thought it was dawn and ended up waking up and wandering around the campsite with James at 3am. We did some light painting photographs. Or the best that we could with this simple digital camera.


A Joshua Tree


A Yucca with the flash filtered by my finger




Light painting on the rocks




Another Joshua tree

LALA Land

2/12
Made it out of Oakland by noon and got on the road to L.A.
The valley is a peculiar landscape. Lots of farm land, numerous high tension power lines, epic mountains in the distance, and a peculiar fog shrouding the path ahead.


We made it to Melanie's pad by 7. She's in Hollywood, like Hollywood Hollywood. We walked around the neighborhood for a while, investigating the local Goodwill and then Hollywood Boulevard.


Bird-of-Paradise flowers grow here, right out of the ground.


An orange. From a tree on the sidewalk.

Later that evening, on a walk to the grocery store, we walked by Kat von D's tattoo spot, where they film LA Ink.
Called in a Capt. Beefheart request to 89.9 FM


Scout



2/13
We all bussed out to Santa Monica to check out the beach and try and catch the sunset. While waiting on the bus there was a fleet of planes doing skywriting.
Burrito carts and some Ghost in the Shell that evening.










2/14



Went to the farmer's market and found Light My Fire, a kiosk that only sells hot sauce. This is one of them, although it is kind of blurry. The best part is where on Osama bin Laden's turban it says "loser".
Here's a link to a product page for it.
This place also carried 1 million Scoville heat unit hot sauce. A Scoville unit is a measure of capsaicin content, the chemical that makes chilis spicy. 16 million Scoville units is pure capsaicin. A jalapeno is about 2500 to 8000 SHU. With a bit of searching we found a 7.1 million SHU hot sauce!

We ended the evening with a late night visit to La Brea Tar Pits and getting hopelessly lost in a bizzare gated apartment complex.


Sad Mammoths


A tarpit. They looked like mud puddles mostly but do smell like tar. I wanted to get some tar on my boot but they have the pits fenced off...


A sculpture nearby the Tar Pits