Speed enforced by aircraft
I floored it from The OC to try and get to my next stop during daylight. That lasted about half an hour until I met the other 50,000 cars also trying to get out of LA at the same time, on the same road. I heard Los Angeles traffic was bad, but on a major freeway this was just mental.
I eventually hit Palm Springs in the evening, absolutely exhausted considering I’d crossed the International Date Line and despite the clock saying it was 7pm, my body was convinced it was 11am the next day (and that it hadn’t slept yet).
Palm Springs is one of those “why on earth did they decide to build a town here?” sort of places. Nestled in against the side of barren mountains in the middle of a desert valley.
This pic of the pool sort of summed it up for me:
The next morning I decided to head down to the festival via a random inland sea I’d heard about just a few weeks earlier.
The Salton Sea is basically just a big salty lake that had minor success as a resort area some forty years ago. About all it has these days is a few trailer parks and catchment from America’s most polluted river.
One of the cool relics I wanted to find was the North Shore. This tiny little town sums up the rise and fall of the Salton pretty nicely.
(My Dodge Charger hire car. The Thrifty car rental girl convinced me it was a ‘hot deal’ to upgrade. I still have no idea why I agreed, but it does look a lot cooler than a Kia Rio. )
After half an hour exploring the area I got way too freaked out with how eerie the whole thing was and thought it best to head back up to Coachella.
Being in the middle of Californian Date country, and absolutely loving the things, I couldn’t pass up the big signs just down the road that said “Try one of our famous Date Shakes!”. So I pulled into a date farm and enjoyed the nicest thickshake I’ve ever had.
After that I figured I really should get to the festival and setup camp… so I pulled out of a car park and headed down deserted desert highway.
A few minutes later I noticed a car and a truck on the wrong side of the road a couple of kilometres ahead, and heading straight for me. I assumed they were just overtaking someone, but couldn’t really see any cars on the other side of the road. Pretty soon they were starting to get a lot closer and didn’t seem to be changing lanes any time soon…
When they were about 500 metres away I had a sudden and frightening realisation that I was driving on the Australian side of the road, freaked out, then quickly jerked the wheel to the right.
…
(and I have absolutely no idea what these signs mean…)
January 15th, 2008 at 3:55 am
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