Palm Springs, Baby, Part 1

A star-studded oasis in the Mojave ever since the heyday of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack, ‘PS’ is a retro-chic getaway for LA urbanites. We’re here for ten days to do like A-list stars and hipsters do: lounge by a mid-century modern hotel’s swimming pool, go art gallery hopping and vintage shopping, then drink cocktails after sunset.

The hot colours of a desert blooming with wildflowers animate The Saguaro Hotel where we’re staying. It offers uncomplicated fun with a splash of mid-century technicolour. The view from our room is hard to beat.

Sandi knows just where she wants to go after check-in and she knows just what she wants—the hotel’s popular bar, El Jefe, for a watermelon margarita.

This morning we’re driving to Salvation Mountain but first caffeine at Koffi (the perfect antidote to watermelon margaritas). This cool, minimalist, indie java bar serves strong, organic coffee and an addictive latté.

Southeast of the Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain is a mighty strange sight indeed: a 100ft-high hill of concrete and hand-mixed adobe slathered in colourful paint and found objects (hay bales, tires, telephone poles) and inscribed with religious messages, surrounded by chapel-like grottoes.

Love doesn’t have to be complicated. Keep it simple.

The work of Leonard Knight (1931-2014) was 28 years in the making and has become one of the great works of American folk art that’s even been recognized as a national treasure in the US Senate. It’s in Niland, about three miles off Hwy 111.

We hop back in the car and swing through Slab City, down the road just past Salvation Mountain. It’s one of the only places in America where you can truly live off the grid.

The area is mostly inhabited by snowbirds and other desert animals during the winter months. There is no electricity, running water, sewer or toilets. It is a refuge for artists and musicians looking to create without boundaries and with minimal expenses.

Taking a page from a Dr. Seuss book, the whimsical Joshua trees (actually tree-sized yuccas) at Joshua Tree National Park welcome visitors at the convergence of the Colorado and Mojave Deserts. It was Mormon settlers who named the trees because the branches stretching up toward heaven reminded them of the Biblical figure Joshua pointing the way to the promised land.

Rock climbers know ‘JT’ as the best place to climb in California but kids and the young at heart also welcome the chance to scramble up, down and around the giant boulders.



Hikers seek out hidden, shady desert-fan-palm oases fed by natural springs and small streams, while mountain bikers are hypnotized by the desert vistas.

We’re hiking the Hidden Valley Trail and the Keys View Trail.

The breathtaking views at Keys View (5185ft) take in the entire Coachella Valley and extend as far as the Salton Sea and, on a good day, Mexico. Looming in front of us are Mt. San Jacinto (10,834ft) and Mt. San Gorgonio (11,500ft), two of Southern California’s highest peaks, while down below we spot a section of the San Andreas fault.

The mystical quality of this stark, boulder-strewn landscape has inspired many artists, most famously the band U2, who named their 1987 album The Joshua Tree.

These petroglyphs in a cave were “enhanced” with paint, sometime between 1950 and 1970. Some speculate it was by Disney for the 1961 television movie Chico the Misunderstood Coyote.

Skull Rock is a favourite photo opportunity for park visitors.

To see the natural transition from the high Mojave Desert to the low Colorado Desert we wind down to Cottonwood Spring, a 30-mile drive from Hidden Valley and stop at the Cholla Cactus Garden where a .25-mile loop leads around waving ocotillo plants and jumping ‘teddy bear’ cholla.

The best way to end a dusty day is a soak in the hot tub back at The Saguaro.

Sandi’s Fall Highlights & Musings from Home

“Spoken words fly away, written words remain.” — CAIUS TITUS

Maybe more importantly, “Practice makes perfect.”

Kicking off Fall with a new hobby.

My mom is one of my biggest heroes; strong, spunky, energetic, sensitive, thoughtful, generous, reliable, loving, fun-loving, chocolate-loving, always ready to help and protect her children. Her heart is  bigger than this earth and somewhere in her pregnant belly 54 years ago she was also gifting and growing another heart—mine. The heart she grew for me, not unlike her own, is my favourite thing she gave me. I treasure it every single day and will until the last day it beats. On her 86th birthday she is the best gift of all.

Easy like Sunday morning.

Sometimes you just need to break out a handstand and look at the world from a different perspective.

If the world was blind how many people would you impress? No, really, how many people would speak about who you were as a human beyond what you, your work, or your house looked like? I’ve been thinking about us and our human hearts and how we so often use visuals to hide how we are feeling on the inside. It’s easy to hide behind pretty pictures or bury ourselves in work but it’s seldom that we sit down face to face and ask someone how they are doing and really listen. We live in such a visual age that it’s easy to get caught up in appearances and forget what really matters. Instead of focusing on constantly impressing the world, I’ve been challenging myself to focus less on me and more on others. At the end of the day it isn’t what we look like or what we have, it’s about how we have changed lives and how we have made people feel.

Above all else put on love. — Colossians 3:14

Because everyone needs a welcome pumpkin.

“We yield to a God whose authority brings an empowering blessing, not an oppressive burden. He can satisfy and fulfill us in ways that no person, place or thing ever will. He created us to find supreme joy only in Him, in a profound relationship with the Creator of the universe.” The only way life works, plain and simple, is when we put God first.

BRANDYWINE FALLS TRAIL

Places that make you feel small and your heart feel big at the same time.

BRANDYWINE FALLS

“With freedom, books, flowers and the moon, who could not be happy?”

Outfit of the day.

So, so blessed to be hanging out with this fun-loving, 86-year-youngster, AND that she is my mumsy.

I love this handsome man. Bragging about him might be my favourite pastime because, along with God, he is my everything. There’s no one I would rather adventure with, no one I would rather sit on the couch with and no one I’d rather do everything else in between with. After ten and a half years together we still tease each other, still go on dates, still wake up and kiss, still fall asleep holding hands, still love each other and still believe in forever.

“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction—so easy to lapse into—that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

— ROBERT MACFARLANE

Because 1/2 birthdays should be celebrated.