California!

Hello Sun, you hot burning ball of incandescent gas. Apparently you come up every morning. Who knew? Ahh . . . Whitney and I just got back from a two day trip to Palm Springs. Also known as heaven. We were originally going to go to some conference in Huntington Beach. Then we realized that that plan really wouldn't meet our "doing nothing but sit by the pool and read" goal. So, we flew into Ontario and drove the ninety minutes east out to the desert. Here we are on I-10 (I-10, that's like, way south!!!) driving past the wind farms. We were impressed with them until we were driving back on Sunday morning into 50 mph headwinds and some of them weren't moving. Lame.
On Friday, we sat by the pool from lunch to dinner time with only a 93 million miles, a cloudless atmosphere, a bright blue swimsuit, and SPF 15 between me and that glorious source of warmth and vitamin D. Here's our pool at the hotel. Thank you pool. And sun. And comfy lounge chair. And funny ladies from Canada for entertaining us. That night, we went out to dinner and watched Sense and Sensibility. Which was the sensible thing to do. Because we're girls. And we can. On Saturday morning, we drove out to Joshua Tree National Park to see the ocotillo, choya, and palm oases. We would have driven the to the north end to see the Joshua trees, but that would of cut into our pool time. Which, we promptly resumed by 11:30a and continued until six. Here's me next to the giant flowering ocotillo. Gorgeous (both of us, of course). Well, my hair could use some de-chlorining and less wind. And here's a fellow tourist in the choya garden. These nasty cacti are actually spring-loaded and will attack if provoked. Be careful with those cameras buddy! Here is the palm oases just south of the visitor's center at the south end of the park. It was incredible. Next time I come, I am going to go on the hike to the twenty.nine palms oasis that is a three mile hike from where we were. We didn't have time (see pool comment above). After another several hours at the pool, we grabbed dinner and then watched Persuasion. What a fantastic trip! Thanks Whits!!!