Hunting for wildflowers

I have decided to not make concrete plans for my spring break road trip.  Instead, I will drive with the flow, stop and explore area sites along my drive.  The San Bernardino area will be my focus.  Hopefully I will see fields of poppy and other colorful delights.  Sadie and Zeke are with me.  Hopefully it won't be too hot in the desert so that we can do some hikes in the San Bernardino mountains.  I'm also hoping the crowds wont be too bad.

As usual, I didn't leave the house until 12:55pm, stopping at the Culver's in town for Orange Creamsicle  custard.  The dessert wasn't as good as I thought it would be.  By 1:38pm I was on the road; by 3pm I made my first stop below Picacho Peak State Park, a popular poppy field site.  There were no poppies, but there were plenty of brittlebush below the peak.

Things didn't get colorful until I made it to Gila Bend on I-8 and turned north on AZ85.  I couldn't always pull over and stop to photograph the flowers, but I did manage to slow down enough to pull over in what looked like wide truck pullovers.  There was a lot of traffic here for being a Sunday. Here more blue flowers were along the roadside, as well as the orange mallow.

The further west I got, the more flowers I saw, but I was also losing daylight.  At a rest stop off I10, 33 miles east of Quartzsite, is where I really saw some poppies and other flowers, but now the sun was low.   The fragrant creosote was strong here. The dogs and I took a two-mile walk along a maintenance road off the rest area that seemed to go off into the distance along the powerlines.  The road was rocky and hurt the dogs' paws so I turned around.  This would have been a nice hike in cooler temperatures with some sunlight, as the hills were an interesting geology; they were as brittle as the flowers.  There were a few saguaros here, but cholla dominated.

Once the sun set, the temperature went from 91F to 77F, making the evening quite pleasant.  The moon rose from behind a hill.  Elevation was around 1400'.

Once in Quartzsite, I spent more time there than I should have, gassing up, eating and surfing the net while the dogs rested.  I'm seeing more electrical hook-ups now at rest stops.  I finally made the big jump and joined a Pilot/Flying J travel club.  Steve had advised me that the travel clubs for RVers are quite rewarding.