Feeling much better and totally refreshed, I set off south on the 15. This is a massive road & has stretches of it that are really badly maintained with huge potholes. The speed of some of these drivers & lorries makes me wonder why I did not see more crashes. I passed through the desert area which had large stretches of sand with absolutely no plants. There were also very few trees growing.

I spotted a sign for Peggy Sue's Nifties Fifties Diner which sounded rather cool. So I decided to stop there for a bite to eat. It was just on the outskirts of Barstow and was indeed rather cute. It was also full of army lads from the local base. My salad was truely divine, huge and not covered in sauces which was good as I had had enough fat with my fatty chips the night before.

I took the 247 south east and ended up in the town of Joshua Tree which kind of reminded me of a place I grew up, Beit Bridge. It was a fairly dry looking place, with houses having huge yards, and not one leaf of grass to be seen. I went to the tourist info, obtained a park map & entered the National Park. I decided to take the road that leads to Twentynine Palms so I could spend the night there. The roads are good & there was a fair amount of traffic, and a fair amount of people camping in the various camp sites in the park. There were also a load of people rock climbing over the huge boulders that appeared every so often. For many of them, it looked as though they were being taught by professionals and a huge percentage of them had dreadlocks.The trees are really weird looking - some of them appear to have very hairy trunks. Others appear to have bark on their trunks. A lot of them were also overturned and you could see that their root system did not appear very extensive which surprised me.

In Twentynine Palms, I had wanted to stay at the motel that U2 had stayed at when doing their album, but after driving passed it, I decided to give it a miss as it looked pretty run down. So the Best Western it was. I gave dinner a miss also as I was still full from my massive salad.