The annoying neighbours and the happy ending!

As you already know, we’ve been at the Joshua Tree National Park the last couple of days. At the beginning we thought we can call ourselves lucky that we got one of the sites at the Hidden Valley Campground. Now, we’re not so sure anymore. We really don’t know why this campground got so many good ratings and why people love it so much compared to other campgrounds. More on that later though.

The night on this campground was very challenging for us: In the afternoon a group of men showed up on the campground looking for a site. (Normally only 6 people are allowed to stay on one site. But their group was definitely bigger.) When I saw them taking the site next to us I thought: Let’s see how this is gonna turn out. How bad could it possibly be? Let me tell you this, since their arrival there was not a single quite moment in our corner of the campground until the wee hours of the morning. (Normally, quiet hour starts at 10pm). They were listening to music, climbing on rocks and shouting all night long… That being said they didn’t even bother pay for their site and marked it as reserved. But justice was not far away…

Next morning, during breakfast, the park ranger dropped by (We think someone called him and complained about them). He then proceeded to throw them out. But unfortunately we we’re not in the best mood, not having slept much because of all the noise at night. And like I already said we didn’t understand the good reviews, because this campground wasn’t as nice as we expected it to be. That’s why we left first thing in the morning and drove to the Jumbo Rocks campground. This is also one of the campgrounds in the National Park only a 15 minute drive from Hidden Valley. When we arrived we drove to the very end of the Campground (Hoping we’d a peaceful spot there) We even found a site that we really liked. Unfortunately there was already someone standing on this site. But as we found out the people were already packing their stuff and wanted to leave even one day earlier as they first had planned. We were really happy about that. A site that was beautiful and we didn’t even have to pay for it. We offered them some money but they didn’t wanna take it. That’s why we decided to pay them with some German chocolate (Ritter Sport) and German gummy bears. And as we found out later they even left lots of wood behind. So we decided to make a huge bonfire at night with some s’mores again.

Joshua Tree NP at night:

Some say that the Jumbo Rocks is really crowded. That’s what we couldn’t understand. Even in the evening there were a couple of sites still available. We enjoyed it a lot. (You couldn’t even see our bench and the fire ring from the street) In the afternoon we did our first hike to the skull rock.