This is where our adventure begins!
We left our home in Los Angeles, CA, on March 15th, as planned. (Technically speaking it was the 16th, as we left well after midnight…). After months of prepping and planning Patrick, the kids and I were beyond excited to be off on our grand adventure at last!
We spent our first night on the road in a parking lot not more than an hour from home, but it felt far from the ordinary and very exciting nevertheless. We have months of adventure on the road ahead of us!
We spent our first day away from home hiking in Calimesa/Yucaipa. It’s hot and dry already, but it’s a glorious day to be outside.
At night, after Patrick is done working, we drive towards Joshua Tree National Park. Just south of the park is a patch of BLM land we are hoping to camp on. Less than 3 miles from our destination we get a tremendous scare when our little Fiat starts detaching from the RV! In the dark on the freeway late at night, Fiat careening wildly back and forth behind us, Patrick manages somehow to get us safely off the freeway onto an offramp, Fiat and RV intact. Our tow bar has failed (we still are not sure to this day what exactly went wrong), it is bent and one of the arms came off. We are stranded on an offramp under the glorious desert skies in the middle of nowhere with a tow car that won’t start and two little kids. It takes the kindness of strangers passing by to help us get our Fiat jump started and off on the road again to our BLM campsite.
Our attempts to get our tow bar repaired or replaced while traveling across the US span many weeks and we end up driving the RV and our Fiat separately across the country all the way to Florida… not exactly the road trip we were hoping for.
Our last day in California (March 17) for many, many weeks, we spend hiking the remote desert and playing at a little lake along the Colorado River just next to the border with Arizona.
