I made it to the desert and unlocked a new fear: rattlesnakes. Luckily, I didn’t see any in my 2 hours at Joshua Tree National Park yesterday morning. I only did one quick hike to get a sense of the landscape and then drove through the park. There is a lot of sand and rocks and shrubs and joshua trees. That’s about it. It was cool to see, but I don’t feel the need to go back.

I only had a few hours to explore the park, partly because it gets really hot there at this time of the year and partly because I had to drive to Phoenix and be there in time to pick up my friend Chiamaka at the airport. Initially, Chiamaka was going to meet me on my road trip in Asheville in February, but she had too much going on around that time. Then, she bought a plane ticket to meet me in Chicago in April, but a last minute work trip came up in those days, so we had to come up with a new plan. She has to be in San Francisco this week, so she thought about flying to Phoenix and spending a few days in Sedona with me. It didn’t make sense for her to drive 2 hours to and from Sedona, so I updated my itinerary to spend a few days in Phoenix (really, Scottsdale) with her and go to Sedona on my own after that.