Some of you may have noticed that I've been MIA. Part of it has been due to the fact that work has all but consumed my life and taken to pulling my brain in more directions than it knows what to do with. My 9-5 job has left me exhausted, overworked and feeling slightly homicidal. Never in my life has the term "going postal" ever sounded so poetic before. The bottom line is, I needed a vacation, and I needed one stat. I knew that if I didn't take a mental vacation soon, I'd be sure to end up in the loony bin. So with little reservation, I abandoned my computer this weekend and headed for the hills. Literally.

Renee and I packed up our stuff on Friday afternoon and took off for some good old-fashioned R&R in Palm Springs, CA. Our 5 pets were left at home (under the watchful care of a friend)and the trusty laptop sat on a desk and collected dust for the first time in its life. We packed nothing except a few snacks, some comfy clothes, our bathing suits & a few other unmentionables that I will leave up to the imagination. After 4 hours of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic in LA on a Friday, we finally made it to the desert. Life was beginning to look good again.


Renee and I had never been to Palm Springs before so we were excited to explore. When we arrived, we had a late night dinner at a small diner and headed back our hotel to relax. We decided our hotel room should be "clothing optional" as we snuggled up in our king sized bed with lavish 300-count bedding. The down pillows? Heaven. Our hotel, although considered to be "lower budget" in many people's standards was absolute perfection in our book. It was a tiki-style Polynesian themed "resort" complete with attached Mexican restaurant, tiki bar, 12 person outdoor heated jacuzzi and a large swimming pool. Sweeping views of the San Jacinto Mountains from our second-story balcony was absolutely breath-taking. It was a perfect and much-needed variation to the smog, traffic, noise pollution and insanity that we left behind in LA.

For those of you who don't know, Palm Springs is best known as a gay and lesbian friendly resort town in the desert of California. It is even better know to lesbians as the ever-so-popular vacation desitination for the sorority-style, lesbian-laden drunken week known as "Dinah Shore". Some say there's golf too, but that might just be an urban legend.

Downtown Palm Springs, centered around one long-ish main street, is comprised of adorable shops, restaurants with ample patio seating, hookah lounges, jazz bars, drag queen shows and enough steakhouses to scare a vegetarian straight into another county. Of course, there are also several casinos, quite a few nudist colonies and enough spa centers to massage away the stress, smooth out the skin and finally get that bikini wax your girlfriend has been begging for. Yeah, I said it.

Renee and I enjoyed all these great amenities from a distance, and although we would normal partake in such fanciful things as couples massages, hookah lounges and slot machines (not necessarily in that order), we found ourselves perfectly complacent with strolling down the street, window shopping and most importantly, lounging by the pool, mojito in hand. Afterall, it was a perfect 80 degrees and when your body says "Relax, fool", you best do what it says.

At about 4am on our last night there, the Santa Ana winds picked up and created quite a blustery delight of crazy weather. Never had we seen it rain in the desert before, nevermind with a mixture of sunlight and darkness all in one span of view. Of course, on the morning that we were headed back to LA, the wild weather provided us with a gorgeous rainbow spanning the backdrop of our hotel. I wanted to stay there for at least another week and contemplated packing my bag and running away from society entirely, but obligations brought me back to the monotony of work and routine, as they always do. Don't be surprised though, if someday you hear of the girl that went crazy, ripped all her clothes off and escaped into the wild. With her multitudes of freckles, wild and crazy red hair and a pack of wolves by her side, you can be rest assured she'll be happier than any rich mogul, wall street work-a-holic or multi-business entrepreneur. She'll be more free than anyone.

And with that, I leave you with a pictorial from my weekend in Palm Springs because as we all know, a picture is worth 1,000 words. Next stop: Sedona, AZ, Thanksgiving weekend!

Posted by Renee Gannon at 3:30 PM