A Change in Plans

To travel cross country, you need to be flexible.  That's a lesson we've learned time and time again, and it came up again as we left Grand Canyon.  From Grand Canyon we basically backtracked back down to Williams and then continued on 40 West until we hit Needles, CA.  It was just a quick overnight stop, so the campground was super basic, but it gave us a place to sleep and do our laundry before moving on.  It was still almost 100° at sunset, so I'm glad we didn't stay there long!

After Needles, we travelled 40 West through the Mojave Desert until we got to our exit, which was a local road, one lane in each direction, with soft sand on the shoulder.  As we exited we saw a sign with a bridge weight limit but it wasn't very clear.  We continued down the road, with the intention of hitting Rt. 66 and continuing on to Joshua Tree National Park.  When we got to the intersection, another bridge sign popped up and showed us that if we continued on 66, we would hit a bridge with an 11ton weight limit.  We've never weighed our rig full, but we know our "dry" weight is almost 10 tons, so when you add in gas, anything in the holding tanks, all of our stuff, and towing Animal, we figure we are probably between 12-13 tons.  The intersection was just wide enough to spin around without landing in the soft sand, so we flipped and headed back to Rt. 40.  I looked for a new route to Joshua Tree, but there wasn't any easy way there without adding hours onto our trip.  We decided that we had seen enough desert so far on this trip, so we cut our losses and called San Diego to see if they could get us in a few days earlier.  They had availability, so we headed straight there.  We stopped at In 'N Out Burger for dinner at the end of our long drive... Because I couldn't come out west and not try In 'N Out!

I'm bummed that we will be one less National Park, but we made up for it with extra fun time in San Diego.  More on that in our next post.