NOTE: This post was written on May 13, but was “embargoed” for a few days to preserve the surprise of a birthday visit to Maureen’s sister in Santa Cruz. More on that soon…

It’s a cool morning in Joshua Tree National Park and I’m savoring the chill, aware that it won’t last long. By 8 am the sun will clear the Pinto Mountains to the east, and start to warm the desert plain. By 9, it will be hot.

We spent the last two nights at Belle Campground, a pretty and peaceful spot among the park’s namesake trees and jumbles of ecru granite. There are only 18 sites, and the campground was full both Thursday and Friday. Had we arrived even an hour later, we might not have secured a spot. But we got a good one—site 10—big enough to park our truck and trailer, and I’m extra glad we chose Belle after attending a ranger talk at the much larger Jumbo Rocks Campground last night about desert tortoises (or “sea turtles”, as the adorable toddler in front of us kept calling them, much to the amusement of the ranger and the small knot of campers around his laptop). Jumbo Rocks was packed with people and vehicles, and buzzing with the chaotic energy that generates whenever crowds of young people gather in one place on a Friday night. I might have preferred that vibe 15 or 20 years ago, but now—with less than four months until I turn 50— I’m much happier to pass a peaceful afternoon among the rocks and trees, and a restful night beneath the stars.

I have wanted to camp at Joshua Tree for a long time, ever since my first drive through here 15 years ago. That trip to the Mojave shortly after relocating from Boston to California was when I first fell in love with the desert, culminating a decade-and-a-half later in a move to Santa Fe, NM. Southwestern landscapes seem simultaneously vast and intimate in a way no other terrain does. Climb up a rocky hill, and you can see for miles in all directions. Scramble back down, and the desert shrinks to just what is immediately around you. You can walk around a pile of rocks or pass through a stand of mesquite, and the scenery will change entirely—almost like a film studio backlot where turning a corner takes you from one movie set to another.

That cinematic analogy is an apt one for Joshua Tree, so close to Los Angeles and almost certainly the filming location for some of the westerns I watched Sunday mornings on Channel 56 while growing up in Boston. (Although the spiky, many-limbed trees look more like alien monsters I’d see later Sunday afternoons on the same channel during “Creature Double Feature.”) We toured the northern and western areas of the park yesterday, and while Maureen stayed with the dog at the truck I was able to squeeze in a few short hikes. Just a few miles apart from each other, they offered radically different experiences—from the sandy hollow at Indian Cove, to the boulders and palm trees at secluded Hidden Valley, to the flinty high desert trail above Desert Queen mine.

We arrived here Thursday afternoon from Winslow, AZ—which, despite the song, is not actually such a fine sight to see. There is a small plaza with a flatbed Ford parked nearby, and a restaurant across the street with outside speakers playing The Eagles and Jackson Browne non-stop. But the town itself is, like much of backroads America in 2017, mostly empty storefronts and slightly crazy old people wandering around and grimy cars with Trump/Pence bumper stickers parked in front of even grimier bars with Coors Light banners flapping in the breeze.

The plateau east of Flagstaff where Winslow sits is flat and featureless, except for a huge hole in the ground where a meteor smashed into the earth tens of thousands of years ago. We passed our first night in an RV park owned and operated by the same people who run the meteor crater as a tourist trap, but we arrived too late to see the crater before they locked the gates. The RV park was very nice, but word on the street is that the meteor crater itself is kind of a rip-off ($20 a person to look into a dry, dusty hole full of nothing).

We had spent that afternoon driving from Santa Fe in the rain, with a long detour through Petrified Forest National Park. Despite the cold, damp weather, we enjoyed the scenic driving loop that overlooked the Painted Desert and offered glimpses of Native American petroglyphs and the stony stumps of petrified trees. Petrified Forest may be the perfect national park for a day when you really don’t feel like getting out of your car much, since all the major sights are right by the road.

Joshua Tree, on the other hand, is a park that rewards a bit more exploration. We’ll need to come back sometime without the dog, so we can get further off the road and into the desert landscape. But for now, we’re packing up and hitting the road for a night in Santa Barbara, and then on to Santa Cruz for a surprise birthday visit to Maureen’s sister, Mary Clare.