WORDS & PHOTOS BY PAIGE BOWERS
“I DON’T KNOW IF I WANT TO GO OUT AGAIN TONIGHT.”
10 am. Saturday morning after another night out in
Encinitas. I had already been up checking AirBnB Rentals
online for an hour.
“What are your girls plans for the weekend?” one of our
coworkers asked Friday during the 2 o’clock mandatory
coffee break. Us, being natural nonplanners, your more of
the “go with the flow” type people, had nothing specifically
planned in mind. We figured we would enjoy the usual:
probably hit up the strip of beach bars at night and enjoy
the sunny weather during the day. “You all should check out
Joshua Tree.”
What even is a Joshua Tree? If you google it, which we did
about 2.5 hours into our drive there, you will see thousands
of pictures of this funky cactus tree hybrid thing, lots of arid
desert landscapes and some hikers. Turns out California has
a whole park dedicated to this specific tree, which made
much more sense upon our arrival.
We woke up Saturday, searching the trusty AirBnB, and
found a 35$ stay. Total deal, but wait, even better–turns out
it’s a goat farm. Thirty five bucks to stay in a camper and
play with goats all night in the desert…sign us up! Without
a second thought, we packed the car, bought some jugs of
water, filled up the gas tank and then mapped it to Joshua
Tree, California.
This would be our first AirBnB. This was also about to get
extremely interesting.
We followed the cryptic directions off the main road,
traveled down dirt roads and arrived at a pile of trash. A
massive pile of trash. After deciding this couldn’t be it, that
we had somehow missed a turn or didn’t know what exactly
500 feet was, we backtracked and asked some people
down the way. The only soul who knew the guy we were
looking for was an 85 year old man who was baking in his
wheelchair in the desert sun. He extended his finger toward
the pile of trash as we looked at each other confused,
hoping he was deranged.
Questioning all of our decisions we drove back up to the
pile