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March 29, 2005
"Everything was great until someone passed me a tube of lube."
Thanks to a timely call from Sanjay, I was reminded that it's now prime wildflower season in the desert, especially with all the rain this year. Alas, my next three weekends are completely shot (Ambercon in Detroit, ILP Class Weekend, Center Meeting), so it's a good thing that I was able to get out and take a look around this past Sunday.
After some hemming and hawing about time and destinations with my roommate, Henry, we drove out to Joshua Tree National Park and spent a few hours of the afternoon poking around the shrubs and rocks. As much as the flowers were the driver for the trip, I really enjoyed climbing all over the rocks more. Walked away with a bunch of pictures and perhaps a skewed image of what a desert is supposed to look like. Quite frankly, it was pretty green, but I don't really have an image of a burnt brown desert to compare it to. I've only been out in the desert during wildflower season.
Or on the way to Vegas, which was usually in the dark.
We tried to find Roy's Restaurant on the way back, but by the time we figured out it was in Rancho Mirage, we'd already passed it and were floating around Palm Springs. Finding Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs though, there was a wealth of food choices, so we stopped.
There was just about every kind of food you could name and there was a really fun hip crowd drifting all over, so it was a really fun atmosphere. To top it off, there was a street fair going on nearby.
Everything was great until someone passed me a tube of lube.
Pretty bizarre experience, really. I'm used to being passed samples of gum or shampoo, but it was definitely a surprise to get a tube of something that pretty much looked like KY Jelly with an ad on the back for a website for men to hook up with men for casual sex.
The timing was spot on, too, as I had just commented that I thought we'd wandered into the "gay part of town," without knowing that Palm Springs is an apparent gay mecca in Southern California.
It's all good. There were a lot of great sounding parties around, spilling out onto the streets and such and had it been a different night and if we weren't a little dusty from hiking in the desert, I may have considered stopping into see what the nightlife was like, but as it was, we were just hungry, so we ended up at a French-Belgian place called Pomme Frite (literally, "Fried Potato," or french fries).
The food was amazing. Henry had a mixed grill of salmon and mahi mahi and I had duck a l'orange. Both were superbly prepared and, if I were in the area again and didn't slag off to Roy's, I'd consider going to Pomme Frite again. The deserts were fantastic, too, with Henry finding a contender for Soo Sun's ongoing search for the perfect creme brulee.
After that, it was a fairly uneventful drive home, with me slipping in and out of consciousness (thankfully, Henry was driving at this point). I love spleen chi deficiency...
Pictures to follow at some point, but it may be during or after Ambercon.
Posted by KinCross at March 29, 2005 12:14 PM