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.

These photos were taken on my flight from Dallas to San Francisco in March. A very nice lawyer was sitting next to me. I clicked away for a while before she said, “Your job looks a lot more fun than mine!” After watching her spend the flight using her highlighter on stacks of rather uninspiring material, I had to acknowledge that she spoke the truth. (Not that I get paid to take pictures from an airplane or anything, whereas I am certain her hours on that plane were billable.)

If someone were to pay me to take pictures from a plane, I hope they would provide me with a cleaner window than what I got that day. I’d be open to extra peanuts as well, and the whole can of apple juice instead of just the cup.

Because I had the chance to do lots of photographing with real cameras during March and April, I kind of forgot about the camera on my phone. But when I Bluetoothed photos from my phone to my computer today, I realized there were enough for a post. Heck yeah!

For those of you who are new to our blog: I post pictures taken with my cellphone every month (or two), and every now and then Patrick posts a few of his own cellphone pics (taken with a much fancier cellphone). Click here to see previous cellphone pic posts (opens in a new window). No claim is being made here that these cellphone pics are of high quality, nor is any attempt made to tone down their junky weirdness. Nor are we implying, as Patrick mentioned in a previous post, that we would ever take your wedding pictures with our cellphone cameras. Unless you wanted us to, of course.

So, back to March and April: I can hardly wait to show you more photos taken with real cameras, but what with one thing and another it’s taking a long time to get those done. The cellphone pics, on the other hand, take almost no time at all to import and process. I pick random presets from my Develop Presets folder in Lightroom and just slap ‘em on and that’s all there is to it. Makes me feel like being a photographer is easy, for a few minutes anyway.

TO SEE THIS MONTH’S EXCITING SELECTIONS PLEASE CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PHOTO BELOW.