California - Algodones Dunes

It's been five days since I've last had a shower. 

For the most part I'm handling it okay, but baby wipe sponge baths can only take you so far and today was the day I reached my breaking point. 

It all comes down to my hair. TJ has this beautiful mane of long, red hair that she can sneak into a variety of styles that very effectively conceal the fact that we are, in fact, dirty desert hippies who don't bathe. I, on the other hand, have this short, dark, straight, growing out pixie cut that, every night, likes to style itself into a little hair explosion on the side of my head. Couple this with my complete inability to rock a doo-rag and I'm left with something akin to a sad, discarded birds nest.

This look has worked for me here in Slab City. These folks are no stranger to the greasy hair burst, but I knew that today we were leaving not just this magical nomad camp, but the State of California too, and that traveling meant taking my sponge-bathed, greasy-haired self into civilization to interact with other, shower-possessing humans. Something had to be done. 

The only problem was that, with no running water in the slabs, we were down to one last bottle of water. 

But you know what? I am very pleased to say that I successfully washed my entire head of hair with that one 500ml bottle of water. I got my it wet, I used my bio-friendly shampoo, and I rinsed it all out, with one damn bottle! 

I'm sorry to carry on about this, but it's a god-damned miracle! 

Anyway, freshly "bathed", we said goodbye to Slab City and after a quick bite to eat in the nearby town of Brawley, we headed towards our next destination: Quartzite, Arizona!

TJ has this cool little collection of off-the-beaten-trail landmarks, collected over time from a variety of people that she's met in the past few years, and we've been trying to hit up as many as we can. Slab City was one of them, and a weird little hot spring in a barn outside Quartzite is next on the list. 

It was late afternoon by the time we turned onto Highway 78 East, and before long our entire landscape had changed. 

I mean, we've been in the desert for a little over a week now, but I don't know if Joshua Tree really felt like the desert so much as a different world altogether, and Slab City was very similar in feeling. Neither of these places, however, prepared us for the sight of literal and actual sand dunes. 

It's apparently a recreational park for ATV's called the Algodones Dunes, (their incessant whine really put a crimp in my Arabian Nights daydream,) but it was still pretty surreal to see sweeping, crisp-edged dunes outside of the Sahara Desert. We ambled around one of the look-outs for a bit and took some more pictures before getting back on the road, not wanting to arrive too late to our next digs. 

Clean hair, don't care.

Not long after we left the dunes, highway signage warned us that there were "dips" in the road ahead and we spent the next ten minutes saying "weeeee!" as the van ambled over the rolling highs and lows of this funny little desert highway. 

The terrain quickly became brown, rocky, and overrun with creosote bushes and the occasional sun-bleached desert log. The sun started to set behind us and the bright blue sky caught fire with hot yellows and bright pinks. Is it a rule that hot deserts require equally fiery skies? I spent a good long while taking a bajillion pictures of it in the rear-view mirror thinking about all the amazing things we've seen and done so far and wondering if this was the Sunshine State's way of bidding us farewell. 

As we ambled towards Arizona, the moon rose over the Chocolate Mountains, clear and orange and the biggest I've ever seen it. Where I grew up we were always surrounded by large mountains, which while beautiful, generally block all visuals of the moon until it's already high in the sky. Here, where it's flatter, it appeared in the sky like something out of a dream; surreal, just like the rest of this place.