What on earth are you doing in Rancho Cucamonga on your honeymoon??

Becks with her giant pancakes

It would be fair to say that I wasn't particularly looking forward to the long drive from Solvang to Joshua Tree National Park, so the night before we'd been looking at the map of somewhere to break the journey along the way. We settled on Corky's Kitchen and Bakery in Rancho Cucamonga as a point to aim at, a bit over half way and beyond what should be the worst of the LA traffic.

Corky's didn't turn out to be the idyllic American diner you'd perhaps be dreaming of, instead it was modern building in a small parade of bland shops just off the freeway. But we'd arrived and I was looking forward to a break from the driving so we headed inside.

Reuben sandwich

Detecting our foreign accents, one of the friendly servers asked us what we what we were up to. When we said that we were on our honeymoon we the rather startled, and priceless response, "what on earth are you doing in Rancho Cucamonga on your honeymoon?".

Eating enormous pancakes is what Becks' was doing. The pancakes were so large that the accompanying scrambled eggs and bacon had to be served on a separate plate. They were fearsome looking beasts but Becks put in a valiant effort only leaving a amount for a takeaway box.

My reuben was thankfully a lot more modest.

Rolling back into the car we completed a trouble free drive to the Air BnB apartment we'd rented in Joshua Tree just outside the National Park.

Our Air BnB house in Joshua Tree

In the evening we took a load of washing to the laundrette and sat there while it was going round in the machine. There were some 'characters' who came to do their washing while we were including one women, who after studying us, decided to come over and tell us that she thought we were a well suited couple.

Fed up of eating out we made our maiden visit to Walmart to pickup some supplies for the next couple of days. The US hypermarket was a sadly underwhelming experience and not that different to big supermarkets in the UK or France (or at least the Joshua Tree branch wasn't).