Monday, October 02, 2006

VACATION FROM HELL?

We live in reasonably hot country, and it's been a horrid summer. But the heat wave had broken and temps were down into the bearable low nineties. Forecast for Palm Springs was high nineties the week of our vacation, but it's drier in the lower Mohave than where we live. That makes the heat more bearable.

Who would have guessed that Indio, where our timeshare is, would be 109 when we arrived?

And that we'd find a sign in our room advising us to keep all our doors and windows locked at night as a safety precaution, and don't turn the A/C below 75 or it will freeze up?

Oh, great. Just great.

It dropped to 107 the next day. A cooling trend, they called it. It only reached 104 the following day. Oh, joy.

My husband forgot an important attachment for our computer mouse, and, in the searing heat, when the asphalt was sticky underfoot and you could smell it melting, we made three trips to a Radio Shack buying and returning things that turned out not to work. We drove to Palm Desert to an Office Depot (no one seemed to know where it was located). OD referred us to Radio Shack. We stumbled on a Staples (not listed in our phone book), and they had something that at least made the new mouse work...on XP but not 98, where hubbie stores much of what he works on. Then it was too warm to ride our bikes, and he said his hamstring was bothering him too much to play golf.

I wanted to go home. But the thought of packing up what we'd just unpacked was mind squelching.

Hard to believe, but we've adjusted. After two VERY cranky days, the temp dropped a bit more, and we've salvaged happiness here. I did my arthritis exercises in one of the deliciously cool pools, we bought cheap ice cream cones at Rite Aid (mint'n chip's my favorite), found a Starbucks, rode ten miles on our bikes early Sunday morning, and played eighteen holes of less than perfect golf today.

Mostly my husband's been watching Cold Case Files, and I've been reading a Mr. and Mrs. Sherlock Holmes book while writing a romance involving ski patrollers and an avalanche.

Hopefully, the temp will continue to fall and we'll be out on bikes and the golf course again before we pack up and head for home.

During the heat here, we reminded ourselves about the year we did a 31 mile bike tour from Old Faithful to West Yellowstone. When friends took us to breakfast the first morning of that vacation, it was 4 degrees. It'd been in the nineties when we'd left home. Our first 8 mile practice ride into Yellowstone was exhausting due to the altitude. But, in a couple of days we'd adjusted to the altitude and weren't even wearing gloves if the temp was 35 or higher. The day of the bike ride we cheerfully arrived at the Chamber of Commerce building, where we were to be vanned to Old Faithful, amidst threats of snow.

Which all goes to show that although you can't always salvage happiness from a bad situation, most of the time you can.

Well, this isn't Death Valley. It only seems like it.

Dee Ann
Posted by Dee Ann Palmer 2:18 PM 0 Comments:

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