Thursday's Travel Channel-esque adventure took us to fabulous Palm Desert, CA, which is actually pretty nice and where we'd gone many times in the past, enjoying the shops and restaurants of El Paseo and the amenities at the local resorts. But this time, with our friend Jennifer in tow, we encountered our greatest challenge:
The Living Desert! When Fran initially suggested the place as a meeting spot for us and Jen, I didn't really know what it was. I pictured some vast expanse of sand and rocks and Saguaros. But, no, it turns out that the Living Desert is, in fact, a zoo. A desert zoo, to be sure, but a zoo. Well, okay, I thought, I'm game for it. We are members of the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park and visit those places whenever we can, so why not another zoo?
The good thing about Thursday afternoon in Palm Desert was that, being a December day, the weather was not desert-hot, nor as icy cold as the nights have been lately. It was perfect zoo-strollin' weather. Let's take a walk, shall we?
After perusing the handy maps they handed us after we paid the admission free (they gave us two maps -- hey, joker, we're three paying customers here!), we decided, well, Gecko Gulch sounds interesting. Here's Gecko Gulch:
Now, we assumed that we'd see geckos in Gecko Gulch. And while we have plenty of said lizards in our own neighborhood, we thought we'd see, perhaps, several interesting varieties of geckos there, with plenty of opportunities to make obvious and unfunny auto insurance mascot jokes. Instead, the total number of live geckos seen in Gecko Gulch was: zero.
Here's a fake gecko:
And here's a fake raptors' nest:
But there were no geckos. Much to our (and every other visitors') disappointment, Gecko Gulch is just a playground. No geckos at all. Oh, well, let's go over to the butterfly tent. The tent is where you can go and walk in and have butterflies land on you and flutter around and stuff. They have one in San Diego and it's interesting, so we figured that this one would be at least mildly diverting.
Uh oh:
Two bucks? To look at butterflies? Well, okay, let's... no, wait:
I'm not sure when the color orange became representative of "poor." We went into the tent anyway to see how poor "poor" actually meant, and the gift shop cashier immediately barked a "may I help you?" at Fran and Jen when they walked up to the window to peek in. It turns out "poor" meant "none." Too cold, apparently, for the little bugs to fly. But they'd have taken our two bucks had we offered.
A stroll past the rocky hill said to contain Bighorn sheep turned up nothing. Then we encountered a vast expanse of nothing, marked by warning signs:
And one more welcome sign (it says "Restrooms"):
...which would have been more welcome had the arrow not been pointing to two forlorn porta-potties.
Let's look at the scoreboard, shall we? Total exhibits perused: three, plus a large space that we presumed was where an exhibit might be located in a parallel universe where things were laid out in a more reasonable manner. Total animals observed: zero. Disappointment and sardonic wisecracks abounded.
But around the next bend, behind a Pepsi machine...
It's a bird! What kind of bird? Who cares? It's a bird! What's it doing? Let's look a little closer:
It's shredding a mouse for lunch! Paydirt!
And here's another bird!:
There were more, but birds kinda bore me, so I wandered across the way and... look! A real live animal!:
A white-nosed coati, one of two wandering around the exhibit. Okay, this is much cooler. We're on a roll, right? Not quite. Next, some cacti, because a display that looks suspiciously like the cactus department at Armstrong's Garden Center is worth the price of admission:
And then we strolled through the Canyon Garden, which was pleasant enough but sent me into that zone of boredom when I started to stick the camera out at arm's length and take pictures of myself:
There's a happy expression, huh?
Here's the stagnant water exhibit:
The phallic cactus exhibit:
And then an exhibit that excited me:
"Frogs on the Edge"! They're edgy! Extreme, even! I expected to see frogs wearing shades and throwing attitudes, but... no. It was just a standard frog exhibit, but without many frogs. Snakes and mice, though (not in the same display).
Things got more standard-zoo style after that, with foxes and wolves and stuff, but you've seen that. And a mountain lion:
Oh, and meerkats!:
In the meantime, my camera battery ran down. I've ordered a new (cheap) battery, but the old one was going to have to do until the new one arrives, and, well, it didn't do. I used my cell phone camera for the above shot, and other shots with the phone, frankly, sucked. So we wandered and saw the Bighorn sheep (they'd been hiding on the other side of the hill) and zebras and lots of foul-smelling furry things and then came to the cheetah exhibit and I fired up what little battery power was left to get these shaky, long-distance shots:
Okay, so we DID see something cool, several things, to be clear. But as we left the place, we happened upon the coolest. They had a model train setup that was mindbogglingly huge and intricate, with several different "villages" and detail that was amazing. It stretched out over a wide area with many bridges and trestles and sight gags like a washed out bridge with a tanker partially submerged in the water, and I had no juice left in the camera to take a lot of pictures of it, but one detail had to be memorialized:
KDES! A real radio station! Okay, that's not what the station actually looks like, and the tower doesn't go up very high nor has it an FM antenna, but, still, it's KDES! Here's a closer look:
Yes, that does appear to be an Elvis-like guy with a guitar case being accosted by someone in a suit. I do not think this is a depiction of an illicit transaction. Just wanted to make that clear.
KDES' 104.7 frequency is being sold off to be moved into the Riverside-San Bernardino market as a Spanish station; the Oldies format may be a goner, or it may move to another station. Enjoy it now while you can.
Would I go back to the Living Desert a lot, like we do with the San Diego zoos? No. But was it worth an afternoon's stroll? Sure. But the park's most striking, interesting "exhibit" is the same one on display throughout the Coachella Valley: it's surrounded by the most beautiful, majestic, fascinating rock-covered mountains, and at sunset, they're spectacular. And I still look at them and want to climb up there and see what I can see. I don't know why, but I do. I still love it out there in the desert.
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