Visiting the sun
Started: 2019-02-27 20:33:19
Submitted: 2019-02-28 22:28:23
Visibility: World-readable
In which the intrepid narrator returns to Borrego Springs to visit the sun in the middle of the Seattle winter
When I moved to San Francisco, the locals told me earnestly that San Francisco didn't have seasons*, but that was ok, because we could go visit seasons.
[* That's not entirely true. San Francisco does have seasons, they're just attenuated compared to seasons elsewhere in the temperate latitudes.]
Then I moved to Seattle (which does have seasons) -- and I discovered that I need to go visit the sun in the winter.
After two weeks in which Seattle was overcome by snow, I flew to San Diego on Sunday, 17th February, on the long weekend formed by President's Day. I had Monday off as a holiday, and Calvin had the entire week off school. Kiesa scheduled a flag day for her integrated library system upgrade on Monday (taking advantage of a weekday when the library was closed but the library vendor could be persuaded to work to take down the system and upgrade it). She booked tickets to come to San Diego later in the week to take our kids to Legoland; I went early to spend more time in the sun.
From the forecast the week leading up to my trip I saw a major winter storm hit Southern California, bringing rain (and, to higher elevations, snow). When I landed in San Diego on Sunday afternoon it was partly cloudy, but as I drove east over the coast range towards the Colorado Desert (following almost the same route I took on my visit to Borrego Springs a month earlier) it started raining, and as I approached the high point of my route, at the tiny town of Ranchita, it started snowing.
The snow turned back to rain as I descended the steep winding Montezuma Grade into the Borrego Valley, and kept up as I checked into my hotel, The Palms an Indianhead, a hotel that was being slowly renovated back into its once-lofty mid-century glory, when the rich and famous in Hollywood drove (or flew) to their nearby desert for for fun rather than fly to a tropical beach. (My room, though, was one of the overflow rooms on the other side of the hotel, which didn't have the same charm of the newer renovated rooms.)
I ate supper at a crowded Kesling's Kitchen, right off Christmas Circle in the middle of Borrego Springs. It was still raining when I arrived, but as I left the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared, giving me a clear view of the sky, and hope for a good day in the desert the next day.
