Imperial Sand Dune National Recreation Area

by Madison and Luke


Today, we hit a major milestone in Daddy's military career...a four-day weekend. Daddy's never officially had a four-day weekend. During residency, he always had to work at least part of the weekend. The Army traditionally takes four-day weekends around national holidays. Today, we celebrated our first.


We decided to drive about an hour away over to the Imperial Sand Dune National Recreation Area in California. It takes about 3o minutes just to get into Yuma, so this is only another half hour or so over the state line. The Sand Dune park, or "Sand Park" as Madison called it is about 30 miles south to north and about 10 miles east to west. It was a really neat thing to experience, yet, we didn't see others doing the same thing. It got REALLY hot on the sand dunes, so much so that we couldn't get out much to walk around. However, we will go back in the winter when it's cooler to explore.

We finished our day by going to nearby El Centro, California, where they have an indoor mall. Here in Yuma, we have a really nice outdoor shopping area, but it's outdoors. In the heat, it's not that fun. We checked out the mall, which was new, and decided it will be a nice day trip (it has a Macys, Children's Place, Gymboree, and double-decker carouse-=all things needed for an outing :) . It's definitely even more of a border town than Yuma (only a couple of miles from Mexico), so we got a lot of cool license plates (we're big into the license plate game).

Driving in the "Sand Park"

The road was pretty much deserted.

This is where all of the Star Wars films were made.

So pretty and so huge!

There weren't a lot of roadside pull-offs, but we found one with a view.

Daddy and Madison decided to walk to the top of a dune, while Luke just wanted to chill in the car.

Climbing

Almost there

At the top!

Footprints in the sand

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On the drive home...

We drove all along the Mexico border. It was just about a 1/4 mile off the Freeway. That's Mexico.

More views of Mexico

We tried to get a good view of the black wall in the background, but it looks like a train or something. Along the freeway, they have these additional barriers.

Wall in background; barriers right on freeway

We looked, but we didn't spot any illegals.

The Border Patrol was on watch too...these trucks are everywhere. At night, they have huge spotlights on the wall too.

Driving past the Sand Dunes again

Ahhh, getting closer to Yuma...the start of the Chocolate Mountains

Almost back to Arizona