Palm Springs

Here's the Palm Springs adventure. The room we stayed in was normally $350 a night. Should be pretty high class, right? Wrong. But at least the view was nice. Palm springs was prettier than I expected.


We arrived with zero plans. No idea what we wanted to do. So I googled "Palm Springs hiking" and found a promising one. It was an hour away in the middle of nowhere. We passed miles and miles of grapefruit and orange trees and grape vines.

We got to our destination: Painted Canyon. We were definitely in the desert, it was very barren, but really beautiful as well. The rocks were all shades of purple, pink, and green, but subtle enough that I could not get a picture to do it justice.

We walked through the main canyon to find the turn for Ladder Canyon, which, according to the website, would look impassable. That was a fair description:

And the reason it's called Ladder Canyon:

We went through some beautiful slot canyons:


At the top. You can sort of see the colors in the mountains behind us.

One of the more stunning sections. The white looked fake, like it was...painted...hmm, thus the name.
One of the taller ladders.

I have never seen so many cairns (some huge) and rocks arranged in arrows on a hike before. At one point, we rounded a corner and came across hundreds of small cairns all in one section. It was some serious balancing art. Dan said it was kind of creepy.

The last ladders to descend back into the main canyon.

At the top of the last ladder we had to climb down, there was a hole in the ground full of wasps. Directly in front of the ladder. Excuse me while I have a panic attack, which I did. It was like a horror movie for me. I saw Dan start to put down his foot right in the hole, all in slow motion, then yanked his arm and pulled him back. He freaked out because he assumed I was saving him from a snake. I freaked out because I. hate. wasps.

The only way to get down was to walk inches around the nest and then be completely vulnerable while trying to turn around and get on the ladder. This is quite possibly one of the worst situations I can imagine. A little dramatic, yes, but - a couple of years ago I was swarmed by wasps and since then the sight of a wasp makes me slightly...irrational.

Dan had to give me several pep talks and I finally ran towards the ladder, hearing that terrible buzzing sound all around my head, and got down as fast as I could. And no stings. I survived. And so did Dan. End of story. Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up.

After that, we hiked back to the car, completely dehydrated. Sometimes we think we can hike half the day with only one bottle of water. In 85 degree weather.

At one point in the hike we chatted with some people (some of the very few that we saw) who mentioned there was a pro tennis match going on right next to our hotel. It was just the qualifying matches that day so it was free. Free? We were in.

I don't know anything about tennis, but it was surprisingly fun. And the best part of the afternoon: when Dan read the text message conversation of the 40+ year old man sitting in front of us, in which he told someone he was just "watching some hotties play tennis".

We finished the day with dinner at Outback, sitting near some large and rather intimidating Ukranian pro-tennis players. The next morning we drove back to my sister's house to find the girls so happily playing with their cousins that they barely cared we were back. (Thanks Lisa!).

We tend to pack in as much as possible in these little getaways we take, and it is always fun.