30 hours in Palm Springs Part 1

We decided to take a quick trip to palm springs over Presidents Day weekend. Palm springs is only 2 hours away but I've never spend an appreciable amount of time there except when driving through to Joshua Tree. Our hopes were to unwind just a little and to soak up a little mid century modern design aesthetic.

I had a busy two days planned.

Palm Springs was packed. We were wondering why every hotel in town lacked vacancy and why the traffic was so gnarly going up there. We knew Palm Springs was welcoming guests for Modernism week, but we learned retrospectively that the President was there to golf as well. The desert cities were getting a lot of action this weekend. Its like we can never get away from visiting a destination on a super busy weekend.

And of course, it was Valentines Day as well.

We left San Diego at around 9:30am. We stopped at coffee and a breakfast cheesecake in Temecula -- Hemet Area.

Then we stopped at the Shopping area that I've always wanted to take a pitstop when we go to Joshua Tree. It was massive. I bought a blouse.

The second stop was at the Shields Date Farm. Alex went there years ago and has been promising me a fun time ever since. When we got there it was clear that it was a tourist trap. In retrospect, it was hilarious that the long awaited visit to the date farm filled with promises of magic and wonder was actually just a single room where you can buy a date sweetened milkshake. There was a walk in the back that turned out to be a devotional garden filled with stone biblical scenes. We had fun there even though were aren't the devout type.

Alex seemed to sincerely love the tour.

There was a mister that was symbolic of a baptism.

I had no idea that dates came from palm trees. It blew me away. At one point I asked where the date farm was. When alex revealed that the palm trees were the date farm I felt like I was had.

After that we headed down to el paseo because we wanted to get all of our Indio stuff out of the way. We were pretty shopped out after selling the farm at the Cabozon outlet malls, but it was quite nice walking around this area.

Then we decided to head over to the hotel.

A note on the hotel: We were really wary about the Sahara Desert Hot Springs hotel. It gets around a 1 star on yelp, and everyone had a flaming review for it. We really planned on canceling the trip after we read those reviews and found that every other room in palm springs was occupied. I decided that we should go for it anyway seeing as its only one night, and "we might not even bathe in the hotel room if its just one night!". I was way wrong about the second thing. The desert heat made me want to take a shower every 10 minutes.

It turned out to be a really interesting experience and I felt really uncomfortable when we were there.

The grounds were pretty filthy. I felt incredibly suspicious of the pool. Alex said I didn't let him swim in the hot springs. I'd like to take credit for that, but in reality, we just didn't have the time.

We got changed and headed in to Palm Springs Proper to forge for dinner and see the sights off of Palm Canyon Drive.

We ended up eating at a place called Thai house. They had very good cashew nut tofu. We even had mango sticky rice (my favorite!)

There were stars on the sidewalk. I thought it was notable that the original wheel of fortune hostess had a Ph.D

We had great fun going to the Azul Room. There was a singer called Diva Diana Carter. She did a great job, and you could tell that she was tired of job. Either way, it was fun sitting around drinking with a lounge singer basically there just for us.