Indio - Shields Date Gardens

Thursday, November 21, 2019
Indio, California, United States
My home for the week in the Palm Springs area was a timeshare trade at Marriott’s Shadow Ridge Villages, a golf course community in Palm Desert.  Palm Desert is one of the many towns east of Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley that together make up a twenty-five mile long continuous settlement of around 400,000 population, Palm Springs being the most famous as flashiest but others like Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells, and Bermuda Dunes possibly more posh and exclusive. The wealthier towns are especially lush and green and well-manicured with beautiful landscaping.
My week at Shadow Ridge was technically not a trade but a “getaway”, a week that can be purchased through the timeshare trading company (Interval International) I use. Those can be quite good deals. I paid $377 for my week in a luxury studio unit on the third floor overlooking the gold course fairway. That’s less than you’d pay for a week at a budget motel.  I’m really not much of resort kind of guy and use these mostly as lodging when I travel and plan to be in one area for a week, rather than taking advantage of all the resort amenities.   It’s so pretty, it almost makes me want to take up golf. Well, not quite.  I’m also not one to lounge by the pool in the sun all day, a seemingly popular activity.
The weather my week in the Coachella Valley started out unusually warm with highs in the low 90s. I made the best of it, including taking the aerial tram to Mount San Jacinto. That was followed by a two mostly cloudy days with some overnight rain, and finally some cooler sunny days in the low 70s. What to do in Palm Springs on a cloudy or showery day?  I guess you could go to bars and drink.
I’m not much of a shopper but wanted to buy some dates as a gift from the desert for a few people back home.  The Coachella Valley is one of the few places in the U.S. where they grow and produces about 90% of the U.S. crop.  A Google search of where to buy them listed Shields Date Garden in Indio, one of the places where they are grown, Indio being the biggest town in the valley and the less fashionable east side where service workers live and resorts peter out into agricultural land. The weather remained clement enough for me to have lunch outside at the Shields Garden Café – an appetizer of blue-cheese stuffed dates wrapped in bacon and then something called Pollo Volcano, stuffed rolled chicken breast with jalapeno crema.
Of course, you can’t go to the date gardens without having a date shake, a specialty associated with California generally and the date-growing region in particular.  I never had one before.  Although it seems super rich, thick, and sweet, they claim they use 2% milk rather than cream in the shakes and that the sweetness comes entirely from the dried date flakes without any other sugars added. So I guess I didn’t have to feel too guilty about having it.
There’s a free video on the so-called “sex life of the date palm”. Dates are apparently very tricky and labor intensive to grow, including needing to be pollinated by humans for there to be much of a crop. And I was surprised by how many different kinds of dates there are, all grown here.  And then you can do a self-guided walking tour of the date gardens, not really a commercial grove but more of a park planted in date palms with plenty of religious statuary depicting the life of Christ.
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