Only in Palm Springs ...

That's fine by us!
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We’re now encamped at the stately Wyndham Palm Springs for a week of R n R after a week of theme parks - the most pressing things on the agenda being sun, sustenance and sleep. Getting here was interesting though. We successfully found our way from San Diego without any mishaps – two hours – and then, courtesy of some really crap instructions downloaded from the hotel’s web site, managed to spend another hour and a half finding the hotel itself. This wasn’t helped by the fact that – and this could only happen to us in Palm Springs – we arrived just as the 2006 California Bikers & Hot Rods Convention hit town. So, picture the scene, there’s 3 million (ok, three thousand) hell’s angels riding in convoy down Palm Canyon Drive replete with nazi helmets, t-shirts with ‘If you can read this, the bitch fell off’ on the back, and huge handlebar moustaches, and us in our little hire car in the middle of it all looking English and lost.

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Not only that, but we eventually checked in to the hotel to find that there is another convention going on – the Humanity in Unity (their website says you can pay $330 to find yourself). We’re not quite sure whether this is religious or just weird but, either way, it involves lots of otherwise normal looking people dressed completely in floaty white tunics grinning inanely at everyone and hugging for suspiciously long periods of time before registering for their self worth sessions. Some of them even have dogs with white floaty gowns?

You can even get halloween outfits for your dog here!
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The problem of course is going to come when both parties decide they need their inevitable Starbucks fix. What then? There could be pitched battles between leather clad Harley riders (actually history teachers and chartered accountants during the week) and ghostly happy clappies. There could be carnage.

Tuesday 10^th October

The weird convention is still going on – apparently until next Sunday. This is great news for us and a handful of other people on holiday here. The hotel is full to capacity but because they’re in ‘therapy’ all day, we get to have the pool and facilities to ourselves!! We have to confess to having done little other than sunbathe and read trashy magazines (the US equivalent to Hello and OK are great!!)