The Archive

A Desert Full of Lesbians

Day 2 and the housemates spent a large part of the day lazing around and generally recovering from jetlag.

I did manage to do the highly American thing of buying half the pharmacy at Target in an effort to kill of the remnants of this cold as well as getting a short drive around town in the behemoth that is our rental car.

Turns out Palm Springs is neatly nestled against a mountain, which essentially drains all the clouds of their water before they hit the town, resulting in almost no annual rainfall at all.

The rain, it would seem, drains into a big reservoir-type thing underground and consequently, despite being in the desert, Palm Springs actually has plenty of water.

Neat-o. Oh and word on the street is that the nasty Los Angelinos want to get their dirty hands on the lovely clean Palm Springs water, but they won't allow it. Watch this space for water wars in the near future I guess.

The centre of town, being the first bit built, is right by the mountain. Then as the place grew, seeing as it could only really develop in one direction, it began to spread out across the valley.

The net result is that the 'centre' of town is in fact on the far left, with the rest of the city trailing out like a comet in a rambling tail to the East.

Everyone here is old and apparently wealthy. They also tend to look like they a) mostly look like deadheads or like they've just come off tour playing bass for the Eagles and b) are made of leather.

Apparently, according to some proper Palm Springers (Jerrys? Spaniels?) we went to dinner with, they explained that there are some young people around, but they are busy cleaning the old people's pools.

So yes, we met up with a group of Mark's friends for dinner downtown before heading to a bar (gay, old) and then a club (mostly gay, mixed age) for a good old boogie.

It was actually rather fun. It feels like I haven't had a really good dance in ages and Mark's friends were a good laugh.

Naturally, I did attempt to turn on the charm with a very attractive couple of ladies I met, but sadly they were more literally a couple than I would have hoped for and part of the big lesbian convention that is apparently in town.

That's right. There are indeed a lot of women here but sadly we have just too much in common, in that we all like girls.

As Mark said, "Sorry Peter, I seem to have brought you both literally and metaphorically, to a desert".

Great.

posted by Peter The Great @ 3:20 PM