A Palm Springs Christmas (Part 2.2): The Ghost of Christmas Present

 

After Boxing day, we began our second and last week in Palm Springs. Well, what we intended to be our last week. On Monday, we went on a hike to Ladder Canyon. At Ladder Canyon, there are two different hiking trails-- one longer loop, through the mountains, and one shorter loop inside of it. The easier of the two was, surprisingly, the longer one. The longer one's trail is a sandy trail, with a steady incline, that takes about 3 hours to finish, pretty similar to the above image. The one on the inside is what puts the "ladder" in Ladder Canyon. 

While we hiked the first, longer trail for about 1.5 hours before turning around, the second hike we only got about 30 minutes into before having to turn around. The second hike became almost impossible to continue by the 3rd ladder we came to. The first couple ladders were fairly easy to navigate, but the third ladder came about a foot short from the edge of the next rock up, and about halfway up it, you felt as though you were going to fall over backwards. 

So we decided that was the point to turn around and head home for the day. Overall, the hike was nice. They views were lovely, and on the smaller trail, climbing over the big rocks was a lot of fun. However, my partner and I agreed we wouldn't go back. While the hike was nice, there's something unnerving about going on a hike where it feels like you something you can't do alone. Specifically on the shorter, inside trail, the ladders were barely, if at all secured, and the last one we were on was improperly placed. As my partner said, for every 4 feet of ladder, the base of the ladder should be 1 foot away from the wall. For example, an 8 foot ladder's base would be 2 feet away from vertical, and a 12 foot ladder, like this one, should be 3 feet away from the wall. However, this 12 foot ladder was maybe only a foot away from the wall, where it should've been the 3 feet away. 

On Tuesday, we had a big reading day. I started Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism, which I ended up enjoying more than the other Hendrix book I read. We tried to do an easy hike near us, but when we got to the entry to the park where we wanted to hike, it was so busy we decided to give up. Instead, we explored around Palm Springs area, toured around a couple different shopping centres, grabbed some snacks from Trader Joe's, and rooted through some end of year Barnes and Nobles sales.

On Wednesday, we had to get our COVID test done for our Sunday flight in the morning, then did some swimming in the pool at the house, before heading to a nearby movie theatre to see the new Spiderman movie with my boyfriend and his sisters. As people who grew up watching the Spiderman movies that the side characters were from, my boyfriend and I loved this movie. His younger sisters, as people who did not grow up watching the original movies, also loved the movie. It was super funny and the characters were well-thought out and in line with previous incarnations. It had very good emotional scenes and the comedic relief worked well between those scenes. The only critiques we had were we wished there were a couple less villains, like both Electro and Dr. Curt Connor (The Lizard) could've been cut, in favour of more time developing Dr. Oct and the Green Goblin. 

After the movie, we had dinner at a restaurant in Palm Springs called Shame on the Moon, and it was wonderful. I'd rate it about 4.5 stars out of 5. The steak and veggies were excellent, but the potato cake was too thinly sliced and had a weird creamy filling between the layers that I didn't like. I also didn't like the carrot cake that we had for desert, it had too much in it and came out kind of chunky. 

On Thursday, we drove about half an hour to Cabazon to shop the Premium Outlet store there and spent the day shopping. 

Friday ended up being our most exciting day. It started at the Living Desert Zoo, which was lovely. We saw so many critters, pet some goats, and even fed a couple of giraffes. 

But, even with my intense love for animals, the excitement happened in the afternoon, where we 1) didn't get our COVID test results in the 48 hour period we were told we'd receive them in and 2) we realized we got tested half an hour before out 72 hour testing window opened. So, basically, we had to get tested again, after we paid nearly $200 CAD for our first test. However, with the poor set up of COVID testing here, and how busy all the test sites were, we couldn't find a spot to test us again and get the results to us before our 10:30 am flight the next day. Even when we were trying to find a place to get tested the first time, we had trouble finding a place to take us and we had a good few days to get tested. 

All in all, we couldn't find a place for the life of us, and ended up changing our flight to 2 days later to give us some more time to find a place. So, as I hinted at the beginning of this, we have extended our last  vacation to 16 days instead of 14. 

We spent a large part of that Saturday searching for a place to take another COVID test. 

The next day we did anything was Monday, when we took a drive to Temecula, an hour and a half away, to get a couple of two-hour tests done. Since Temecula was so much closer to the ocean than Palm Springs, we took advantage of it and drove to Oceanside. In Oceanside, we went to a local monastery and took a walk around the grounds, before heading to the water for a lovely lunch of fish and chips. By this point it had been about 2 hours since our test, and we still hadn't received our results, so we went back to the testing site to make sure we would get the results. 

Since the line was even longer than when we were there in the morning-- when we waited for an hour and 20 minutes-- we tried to catch one of the people walking around the test sites for help instead of waiting again. Luckily, we caught someone and they were very helpful and we got our results shortly after. That night we changed our flight to the one the next day, and started getting ready to leave, thus marking the end of our Californian Christmas.