More of My California Journal

Hi everyone. 

Today I thought I would share a few more pages from the travel journal I am making with scraps from my November trip to California.  I've added a few photos also of places shown in the journal, but the photos are not in my journal.

I've shown you photos from Joshua Tree National Park already, but I wanted to try my hand at drawing a Joshua tree. I penciled in the shape and colored this one with markers except for the sky which is a gelato watercolor crayon and for the mountain in the background where I used a watercolor colored pencil. I also added a few bits to the page too.

I picked up this Find Your Park brochure at some stop we made. It is made of heavy paper, and I thought it would work not only for the national parks we visited but also as a mini-page where I could attach other things.

I added some stickers and notes to the front. And when you open the brochure, you can find a few more items like this postcard I picked up at the park.

Fully opened I used this map I found in a tourist brochure and outlined most our  trip except for our first couple of days in LA and the time we spent on the Monterey Peninsula.

In this next page I created a tag (which I have since lightly colored in yellow) and used this fun cactus tissue paper. It would have been better if it was Joshua tree tissue paper, but I had this in my stash and thought it represented the desert enough to work.

Another place we visited in the desert was the Salton Sea. I thought its ecology was fascinating, but my husband thought it was a waste of time. We visited the state park headquarters and discovered a few things about the Sea, and the entrance fee ticket made the basis for my page below.

The Salton Sea was a semi-wet land that flooded around 1905 and created this large body of water. It was salty because of minerals found in the environment leached into the water.  After World War 2 until the 1970's it was a hot tourist area with lots of boating, fishing and beach going as it was an inland ocean.

With more demands for limited water in Southern California and with less rainfall, a lot of the sea has evaporated (as less fresh water is going into it), leaving it saltier and much smaller than it had been. Tourism has really dried up, leaving some previously busy beach towns to turn into ghost towns. Bombay Beach was one of those, and when we drove in, my husband basically turned around and drove out (even though an artist is trying to revive the town). Since the Salton Sea is saltier than the ocean, power boating has basically ended because the salt really corrodes those boats.

The Salton Sea is still a big birding area. At the beach near the state park headquarters, we did see some oyster catchers.

There was some low clouds that morning, and  I thought the views were pretty.

You can see how much the water has dropped though.

The Salton Sea wasn't more than a half an hour drive from where we were staying, and it was even shorter in the other direction to get  to Palm Springs. After we left the Salton Sea we drove into Palm Springs and walked around downtown as well as getting some lunch.

The A frame building in the top part of my page is now the tourist info center, and we had stopped there not only to use the bathrooms but to get directions about where it would be good to go in the city, especially for lunch.

We were directed to Main Street, and we walked quite a ways down and back, getting lunch, window shopping and checking out the city.

We had our lunch at this restaurant below, Maracus. We sat outside and had some delicious Mexican food.

As it was before Thanksgiving, and a relatively warm day, it seemed strange (for me who comes from a more winter  area) to see everything decorated for Christmas. 

And even though we didn't go in, outside of the Palm Springs Art Museum they had this great gigantic statue of Marilyn Monroe.

And this other exhibit also.

And when you walk down along Main Street in downtown Palm Springs, they have their own Palm Springs walk of stars. Here's a couple of examples.

Has anyone had a date shake? I really wanted to try one of these but I was so full from my delicious lunch I just couldn't do it. It's one of the things I will do if I ever go back to the area.

And finally, before this post gets extra long, here's a collage page I made in my journal to represent moments from the whole weekend in the desert.  (Ignore the cactus paper on the left.)

And as I have a few faces on this last piece,  I am linking it up to the Let's Face It challenge at Art Journal Journey

I hope you enjoyed my post today. Thanks for visiting.