Mother, Mexican Food and Mecca

I never would have thought I'd say this fifteen years ago, but I love to visit Southern California. I wouldn't want to live there, but despite its sheer amount of humanity and the irritability that I often feel traveling in a post-9/11 world, it's darned nice to be able to get away from a foot of snow in January. Even if it means high winds and unseasonably low temperatures in the Coachella Valley where I visited. Oh yeah, and the Mexican food here is better, cheaper and more authentic than we have in the Pacific Northwest.

BowlingJoe and his Mother in Indio, CA

My mother lives in a small mobile home community in the town of Indio, east of Palm Springs, and I took a solo trip for a few days last week to see her. As luck would have it, Palm Springs was having one of its worst wind storms of the year...oh...just about the time the plane was on its final approach. I fly a few times a year and am used to the bumps, but this turbulence was like a bad dream involving a wicked witch, a frightened girl, and a flying house. Somehow we managed to land. I'm guessing the pilots were doing tequila shots when they were on the ground to calm their nerves.

Speaking of which, shortly after getting out of the airport my mother and I dropped in at a watering hole called The Beer Hunter in nearby La Quinta. La Quinta is Spanish for "golf courses with exorbitantly priced greens fees". Being a beer snob from Washington State, I was hoping to find a good IPA to quench my thirst. This is challenging in Southern California so I felt lucky to get some draft Sierra Nevada Pale Ale while the winds continued to whip outside. The wind even blew in some caddies from the nearby PGA golf tournament that was postponed after promotional tents started rolling around like tumbleweeds on the course. I learned that some caddies like to drink. A lot.

Some Scenic Drives North of the Coachella Valley

Naturally, I wound up spending the next morning of the trip with my mother, cleaning up blown in sand dunes around her home with a shop-vac. This is actually the perfect way to work up a guilt-free appetite for an In-N-Out burger. I'm tellin' ya' we really need some of these burger places here in the Northwest.

The Salton Sea: Population 1,000,000........Birds

Something else we did was visit the north end of the Salton Sea. This is a huge and somewhat hideous body of water that's actually a couple of hundred feet below sea level (to its credit though, it does attract an enormous number of bird species). It's fed by rivers and streams as well agricultural runoff drainage systems. And it's nearly as salty as the Great Salt Lake. For more information check out the Googles, Wikipedias, and Internets.

Bombay Beach: Actually one of the Better Neighborhoods

For me, the most fascinating sight at the shores of the Salton Sea is a little town called Bombay Beach. Back in the 1920s, someone had a brilliant idea to create a resort getaway town for tourists to spend weekends. But when dead fish started washing up on shore and storms raised water levels beyond belief, it all began to unravel. What you have now is a sparsely populated train wreck of a town that exists because of a few railroad workers and the fact that it's the only place around for miles that has a store. Feral cats roam the streets and properties laden with structures in various states of crumble are in abundance. The word "ruins" comes to mind. I think the original Bombay in India was cleaner. Someone made an award winning documentary film about Bombay Beach and I really need to see it.

We spent the last full day driving through the various towns in the Coachella Valley. Indio, Cathedral City, Palm Desert, Palm Springs, and so on. I was pleased to find the town of Mecca. Some of us have been looking for Mecca our whole lives. And here it was: just off Highway 111 in Riverside County, California. Who knew?