This one is actually from inside the park. We’re getting there, slowly but surely.

The story of my trip to Joshua Tree this spring is being told in a very disjointed fashion on this blog. I’ve given you a tiny preview that didn’t show the park at all, and an image from a Wal-Mart parking lot. Now I’m going to show you a handful of images from the drive home, none of which are from inside the park itself.

Behind the scenes, of course, the photos from that journey are being made into a fabulous multimedia production. Which you will be able to acquire, if you want it, eventually.

Most of the pictures below were taken from inside a moving RV, so any smears or splotches you see are probably bug guts on the windows. The top picture is from the end of our first restaurant meal after we emerged from the park. This was at a Thai restaurant in the town of Joshua Tree. After spending five days in a windy desert, it felt very strange to eat in a restaurant.

Which one of these fortunes do you think I got? You can post your guesses in the comments. The first person to get it right wins a copy of the Joshua Tree trip dvd when I’m done with it. Which will be soon, I promise!

As some of you may know, many Wal-Marts will let you park your RV overnight for no charge. You are also free to purchase their wares as you trek through their store on the way to and from their bathrooms.

Alyssa and Bev and I spent a night in the parking lot of the Bakersfield Wal-Mart on our way to Joshua Tree. Bev is a seasoned RV traveler (we were riding in her Lazy Daze) and is not put off by camping in a parking lot. Alyssa and I, on the other hand, were excited about the prospect of Joshua Tree and not thrilled about the landscape offered by Wal-Mart.

But every day of this trip was special in some way, and our minds were blown even at Wal-Mart by the beauty of the biggest double rainbow I have ever seen in my life. This photograph, taken with a wide-angle lens from the window of the Lazy Daze, only hints at its magnificence.

Not long ago, I traveled to Joshua Tree National Park and took thousands of pictures. But ever since I returned, I’ve been buried in wedding photos and unable to find time to contemplate all the marvels of the desert as captured by my camera. The life of a photographer is one continual effort to catch up.

Catching up often means working frantically to process photos I’ve just taken for a paying gig in order to gain time to process photos from a past non-paying adventure. Catching up usually means moving backwards in time. My sense of time has gotten quite wonky from living this way (and it was weird to begin with).

To add to the confusion, I’m not fully conscious of the details of what I’ve photographed until I look at the pictures later. At the moment the shutter clicks, I’m thinking about exposure, composition, the flow of events, the overall story of the subjects in front of me, the next direction the action is likely to take. It’s not until I am manipulating the photos on the computer screen, alone in a darkened room, that I see what was actually happening. It’s almost always different from what I thought was happening.

I’m not sure what any of that has to do with the photo below, which was taken on a dry lake bed near one of the entrances to Joshua Tree National Park. I suppose I’m trying to explain the feeling I get when I look at this photo and realize just how many bullet holes are in that rusty old refrigerator, and how much sand has built up inside and around it. I didn’t notice those things when I took the picture because I was too busy trying to properly expose the sky and compose the shot and plan my next ten shots and figure out if I’d have enough battery power left for a long sky exposure that night and who knows what else.

Not that it would’ve mattered whether or not I noticed the bullet holes at that moment. It would not have been an earth-shattering discovery; that refrigerator has obviously been there for quite some time, being shot at and collecting sand.

There’s something I’m trying to say here but it keeps eluding me; plus, I feel like maybe I’ve said it before. At moments like these, I’m ever so glad I can just show you a picture.