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.
2025-02-10