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Happy New Year!

We awoke to completely clear skies, alone in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park!

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We drove along Queens Mine Road toward Barker Dam. We saw rabbit tracks and a coyote.

The snow on the road and joshua trees made for fun pictures.

Here the brush was not bad at all, but it was fresh on our minds from the day before. We discussed several ways to avoid pinstriping the vehicle in the future. The first idea was to line-x the whole vehicle, or maybe just up to the windows. Another idea was to find some type of peel-off material you could temporarily stick on the side and peel off and replace periodically. The third idea was to just give up and get the vehicle painted ever few years. Fold out cutters would be handy, or a hedge trimmer, and even a machete could really speed things up. Jason also wanted a way to determine when a low hanging branch was going to hit the roof. We thought a backup camera mounted on the roof might help us accomplish this.

The boys had a snowball fight during breakfast. It was very cozy to be eating hot freshly made scrambled eggs and bacon in a tortilla with hot coffee, watching the boys throw snow at each other in 26 degree F sunshine. Cy (of course) opted to wear shorts during the snowball fight. (I have video but not a picture of this.)

After this we headed out of the park back to civilization and on to Pete and Lotus’ house.

Note:  the best gas prices we saw on the trip were on 12/31 in Western Arizona: 1.89 for regular unleaded gas, and $2.73 for diesel. The Gas Buddy App worked like a charm, helping us find the cheapest gas.