So, here we are in the USA. It is the end of the first week of our trip and we're sitting in a cafe in Joshua Tree in the rain. It is really quite Scottish. We did not think they had weather like this is Southern California.

We have had fun so far. Our journey was uneventful, just long and boring after Sheona had very kindly dropped us off at the quite impressive terminal 5 at Heathrow. Our 6 enormous pieces of baggage were not too heavy, and when we arrived in the US the immigration people let us in with no problems. We then spent a night in the Holiday Inn at Los Angeles Airport which was really quite nice. Much better than Holiday Inn in the UK. The bed was enormous - we speculated as to whether this was something to do with the average size of Americans.

On Tuesday we picked up our RV. We thought it seemed a bit old and ramshackle at first but it has grown on us. Above is a picture of the RV on our first morning in Joshua Tree. The RV has a toilet, shower, hot and cold water, heating, cooker with oven, a bed over the cab and room for six people to sit comfortably. However it doesn't go very fast, and I found driving it out of LA on the first day suffering with jet lag pretty nerve wracking.

We then drove to Joshua Tree National Park, which is about 150 miles east of LA. It's an amazing place - a magical desert landscape full of these crazy trees which give the place its name. The climbing is pretty good. A mixture of trad climbing and sport climbing, and lots of different styles of climbing. So far we've had a day bouldering, a day doing very technical face climbing, and a day of crack climbing. We've met up with our friends Tom and El who have been here for a while already. We plan to say for a few more days before heading north into Utah.