Our time at Oasis Palms sadly came to an end. We loved this area. The sun, the palm trees, the pond and most especially, the sunrise every morning. Despite the enjoyment we experienced here, we knew we had to continue on our way.

We packed up the truck and the camper and hit the road once again.

We drove through Joshua Tree National Park to get to our next destination. We had found BLM land to stay at for the night, which would be our first time staying in a boondocking location.

For those of you not familiar with BLM or boondocking, it means that we are staying on government-owned land that allows for free camping. It does not provide water, electricity, or sewer hookups so it is considered dry camping.

We are hoping to get more accustomed to dry camping so that we can stay at these places more often. For starters, it’s free so it would be great to save money. But the real reason we are so interested in boondocking is that it typically allows us to stay at much nicer places in vastly remote areas with hardly anyone around. 

We drove 2 hours to get to our planned location. There was interesting scenery along the way, as we made our way driving through the Mojave Desert. We saw cholla, which according to Ryan is an alien plant. It is a type of cacti that has multiple branches with several thorns. I would hate to trip and fall on one! OUCH!

After getting through the National Park, we continued on our way to the BLM land. The turnoff to the area required us to drive through dirt roads, which we were prepared for as we knew of the location. What we did not account for was how bumpy those dirt roads would be! They were long stretches of washboard roads.

I had to drive less than 5 mph to decrease the severity of the bumps in an attempt to minimize the jostling of the truck and camper. We were thinking, God only knows what’s flying around inside the RV right now!

And the kitties were NOT HAPPY CAMPERS at this point!

They were quite angry about the bumps, constantly screaming the rest of the way. The frustrating part was that we only had to go less than 1 mile down these roads. It would have been so quick if not for the bumps. But what should have only taken a couple of minutes turned into a much longer duration.

Finally, we made it through and found a spot that we liked for setting up our camp for the night.

We were out in the middle of an open field that was surrounded by mountains. It was a beautiful remote area. There were others in the area, but with how vast the land is there, we were all spread out so far that we had our privacy and personal space.

We only planned to stay here for 1 night. 

It was just a test run of finding a BLM site. We knew we had other places to explore before we had to get to my job and the days were numbered until I had to be there so we decided to keep this a short stay and leave the next day.

Stay tuned to hear about our next destination!