Weekend in Palm Springs

We left Portland under cloudy skies and arrived in Palm Springs to sunny skies and it was the start of a weekend of perfect weather. This is a shot of our hotel - The Embassy Suites in Palm Desert, from our room at dusk on Thursday night. The Hotel has a wonderful Happy Hour (or 2, actually) each night, which is great for socializing and enjoying the company of friends. We found a new Italian restaurant, just near the hotel had a great meal before turning in early, as we had 8am judging.
Friday we had a hound show and we just showed a puppy and despite some challenging behavior from him he won the points - it was a humbling experience - not all Beagles are well behaved, but I have seldom had one who has been quite as out of control as he was - he was happy though! That night we met up with some local friends Jim & Betty, who have one of our beagles and we were taken to their local Mexican restaurant. Very good Margarita's. Saturday was another early start, but the puppy did not win this day or Sunday - oh well - one of 3 was good.
We decided to go on a tour of the San Andreas fault and the Joshua Tree National Park on Saturday afternoon - the tour was in a Hummer - a new experience - and perhaps in retrospect not a wise decision - as it was open air and very windy and by the end of the afternoon, very chilly. The driver was very knowledgeable and told us a lot about the area we were going to. Some of the things we saw were interesting and some were a bit exaggerated! The literature indicated we were going to the San Andreas fault and would walk across a bridge over the fault.- Well the bridge was some wooden planks over some water oozing up from the Oasis and as the fault was a mile wide at that point, it was a bridge to nowhere.... just from one dry spot to another (not quite what I had envisioned)

Then the Hummer took us (7 on the tour) up an old Gold Mining trail into the Joshua Tree National park - it did give you an appreciation for the difficult terrain that a Hummer can navigate - but did we need to do it for 2 hours...with only minimally changing scenery - and zero padding on most of the seats - probably not! However I did get some good photos - see below

We flew home on Monday and its back to the rain! But Thursday and Friday should be dry, before what promises to be a wet weekend of dog shows.