Our homeschooling got off to a slow start today, which was OK since we were waiting for my parents to show up for a visit that will last for a few days.  We had a nice reunion in the RV before they headed off to their hotel of the night.

Tonight I replaced our oven pilot with the new one I had ordered and had shipped to my parents.  The old pilot, pictured below, wouldn’t stay lit, which made using the oven difficult.

Tomorrow we will go hiking with my parents.

Shabbos here was nice as usual.  Saturday night we played a rousing game of Settlers of Catan, and our daughter was victorious:

On Saturday afternoon, we saw a pair of powered hanggliders fly overhead.  Our daughter built a model:

This morning, we dumped our black water tank, which holds the toilet waste, into our “blue boy”, a 35 gallon wheeled plastic tank used to transport RV waste.  The idea is to save the hassle of packing up and hitching up the RV just to empty the RV’s tank.  Instead, we dump the RV tank into the blue boy and drive it to the dump station.

We set off at 25 MPH towards Borrego Springs.  The plan was to drive the 10 miles or so to the state campground and pay the $8 to use the dump station.  To make a long story short, it seems the wheels aren’t rated for even 25 MPH.  By the time we heard a dragging noise behind our SUV, the wheel hubs had melted and the wheels had disintegrated.  The blue boy was badly damaged and had to be thrown away.

Once in town, we returned books to the library, got gas and fresh water, did laundry, and shopped for groceries. Hopefully tomorrow won’t involve any expensive mistakes like today.

John and I went for a ride East on S-22 towards Salton Sea and back.  The wind was pushing us along at 30+ MPH on the way out.  We stopped at an overlook of the badlands at Ocotillo Wells:

On the way back we had to push our way through the same winds that pushed us along on the way out.  We took turns pulling at 12-15 MPH on the flats.  It was brutal.

Once I returned, I patched all of our flat tires.  We have a total of 14 wheels on the trip, as three of our four bikes have both road wheels and offroad wheels.  Of the 14 wheels, five had flats:

Yesterday afternoon we moved the RV closer to the main road.  Cell coverage was so bad in our old location that we had to walk a few hundred feet to make phone calls.  Amazingly, in our old location we were able to pull in 200kbps WiFi from 7.1 miles away, a new record for us.  In our new location, just 200 yards closer to the road, we can now see Borrego Springs in the distance, and we have great cell coverage and 800kpbs WiFi from 4.8 miles away.

Good Shabbos (again) form Anza Borrego State Park!

This afternoon, we packed into the SUV to visit Font’s Point.  The skies were pretty ominous at our RV when we left:

We drove down the road on S-22 for a few miles, then drove up a wash for 4 miles to Font’s Point.  Font’s Point overlooks the local badlands:

The badlands are hundreds of feet below the point:

The badlands to the East show a rich selection of colors:

Holes in the clouds cast dramatic light onto the badlands:

There was a crew at the point building structures (seen here on the left) for filming the movie Last Days in the Desert.  We’ve seen them over the last couple of days as we’ve toured the area, but we only found out today from the crew building structures here what the story is:

….And, Action!

Yessir, another beautiful morning in Anza Borrego State Park:

After homeschool, we headed out of town to explore “The Slot”, a Slot Canyon in the Southeastern corner of the park.  The canyon starts out moderately narrow:

There are a couple narrow spots:

Flash floods carve interesting patterns into the canyon walls:

At last we reached the narrow section:

Even for our daughter, it was a tight fit:

After 100 yards or so we popped out into a wider section:

We walked out for half a mile into what became a more conventional canyon, then turned back:

On the way back, we were passed by a tour jeep.  The driver managed to get it surprisingly far up the canyon:

At one point we realized we were being watched.  This fellow was about five inches across:

The canyon walls are made up of many layers, some of which are composed of a coarse conglomerate:

From the top, it doesn’t look like much:

We arrived back at the RV towards sunset, and decided to drive a couple miles North of where we are parked to Clark Lake.  Not the best fishing this time of year, I guess.  It’s a storied area, the lake once hosted a military airfield and later a radio observatory:

There’s also an abandoned mining facility at the edge of the lake:

Another great day at Anza Borrego!