California!

Well, we finally made it to Jason's house last night at around 10:30. Due to the traffic and it being a Sunday, it was a bit too late to go to his local pub as we had planned, so we stayed in and went through some of the pictures he had taken of Bisbee before we arrived - he is a very talented photographer! Another late night of beers and bullshitting before crashing out in the living room. Phoenix slept in the captain's chair so as to keep an eye out for the three cats roaming around unpleased at his presence.

Morning came early, but our motivation to do anything about it came kind of late. Took our time packing up the bedding and getting ready. Showering in a home and not a hotel was a welcome change :) After getting dressed, I spent a good twenty minutes trying to rearrange the explosion of bags in the back of my car. Four days, to go from perfectly organized to chaos and back again seems like an alright pace ;)

When I finished with the car, it was definitely breakfast time. Jason had told us about a dinner he liked down the road, we eventually found it, and it turned out to have some really good veggie options - they also served really huge portions, so Phoenix was happy. After breakfast we tried our hands at repairing the chip that appeared in my windshield yesterday - not a perfect fix, but I think it looks a lot better! We had some time to kill while that dried, so I set to the business of booking a place to stay in Twentynine Palms, CA.

Never would have guessed a syringe is needed to fix a chipped windshield!

So, with glue dried, bags packed, and Phoenix loaded, we headed to California. Another beautiful, mountain filled drive. Like yesterday, this was a short trip, I guess we were in the car about 4 hours, 5 max. I spent the first half of the drive attaching new clips to Phoenix's backpack - I pictured that being an easy fix, but it took forever! After passing into California, we drove right into another beautiful sunset, again it seemed to just get prettier as the minutes passed - I don't know what it is about the southwest, maybe its the mountains, but these last three evenings have been spectacular!

Mojave Desert

When the signs for Twentynine Palms started showing up, we were anxious to get some dinner and check into the motel. Since neither of us had been there before, and it was pretty dark out, I decided to pull up the address on my phone - it said 24 miles left! This sounded crazy because the town is super tiny, I called the office and was assured that yes, we were in fact about 24 miles out. I accidentally booked a motel in the wrong town - whoops!

But it worked out just fine, those are 24 miles we wont have to drive tomorrow, and I ended up getting yet another free pizza from Papa Johns for dinner! We finally found the correct motel in the neighboring town of Joshua Tree. Its a nice room with free wifi and continental breakfast tomorrow. We're currently in pizza comas, flipping channels and trying to find what we can about the earthquake in Japan. Driving through the country and sleeping on a budget has kept us fairly out of touch with up to date information about these events. Such a terrible tragedy. I heard on NPR today that SXSW has already raised over $23,000 for aid, I hope that beautiful Austin love continues to pour in.