Desert adventure!

My good friend Kristi came to Pasadena this week for work, but had the opportunity to extend her stay for the weekend. Since she had visited before and we had already done all of the LA tourist-y things, we thought this would be an excellent opportunity for a much-needed day trip.  We decided on Joshua Tree National Park because it is amazing and stunning and she and Jason had never been there.  I've been pretty excited about this trip for the last week and had been talking about it a lot at work.  My lovely officemate Anne asked if we were going to visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs, and much to her surprise (knowing my undying love of these creatures), I had never even heard of this place.

Apparently, they were made famous by their appearance in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, but I must have driven right past it the last time I went to Joshua Tree and never even noticed the gigantic cement dinosaur structures in an otherwise desolate area.

Fun Fact: The Cabazon Dinosaurs were originally built to attract attention and customers to the Wheel Inn Restaurant, a diner located in front of the museum.  They now exist to attract people like me.

You can go inside and climb up to the top of Mr. Rex's head and look out his
mouth- the view is actually pretty great.

Also, they're used as visual aids for what is essentially an intelligent design museum.  Needless to say, $7.95 admission = a priceless experience.

The entrance to the famed Robotic Dinosaur Museum.

Fun Fact: In reality, the Robotic Dinosaur Museum is a gift shop with basically a herd of

motion-activated, anatomically questionable dinosaurs in the center.

But it also had these impressive egg thrones and anachronistic mammals, so I let it slide.

This photograph is an excellent and very accurate representation of California.

Seriously- it was beautiful out, despite the wind that blew trees sideways.  We could see snow blowing off the tops of the mountains and the sun was wonderful.  The snowy mountains already feel out of place in the desert, so really, adding bizarre dinosaurs isn't too weird.

As you enter the museum, you are very urgently asked to stop and watch the video that is playing on a loop. We did- the video made some (empty) promises about our future experience at the museum and told us we could keep anything we found in the the little sluice that was located in the garden area.  We were pretty excited to pan for semi-precious stones, so we took the little baggies the museum had supplied for all the treasures we were told we would find and went to work.

Kristi pointed out that were sifting through what appeared to be the same tiny, colorful
pebbles you would put at the bottom of a fish tank.
We took stuff anyway, because we could, and also because we paid $7.95 for something, right?

The garden outside the museum was home to every single dinosaur you could ever dream of.  It also featured every large jungle mammal known to man, right next to the dinosaurs.  There was such a strange collection of creatures and they varied so much in style and scale, it was kind of like someone put out a Craigslist ad for "All the Dinosaurs" and then people just dumped whatever crazy cement dinosaur statues they had lying around their desert home (see below).

Don't try to figure out what is going on, because I have been for the last few days and I still have absolutely no idea.  But where else can a lioness sit regally among these giant beasts?  Which other dinosaur museums disregard scale and general scientific accuracy?

Where else can you pay to see whatever this is?  

Probably other places.

But I had this experience at the Cabazon Dinosaurs and it was spectacular.

Next up: Latest Joshua Tree Adventure, or Of Course I Was Stung By a Bee in the Desert.