Email from Caro: San Diego/Palm Springs

So now I was armed with bad karma, as we set off for San Diego via a tiny little plane and a grumpy-arsed pilot called Carlos.  

Symon discovered he had left his very funky Diesel cap on the shuttle bus and I ran back to retrieve it.  As I was berating him for being forgetful, I literally banged into something.  There I was, lying flat on my back, sunglasses lying in a mangled mess about 10 feet away from me, and I couldn't work out what the hell was going on.  All I could see was Symon trotting off with his backpack on.  It wasn't until I stood up and walked backwards that I realised I had hurtled into a plane wing.  I think I dented it. 

Later, that night, I developed a beauty of a black eye.  I looked as if I had a few too many beers at the local roadhouse.  My new prescription sunglasses were so wonky I had to take them into an optometrist to straighten them out.  When I told him what happened, he just looked at me.  With pity.  Karma.

So, what did I discover in San Diego?  The fashion is all camouflage themed, girls wear their hair in ponytails, with platform jandals (or "slides" as they called here), jeans lace up the side, little tank tops lace up the side, everyone has a deep allover tan, they wear huge amounts of make-up (with too dark lipliner, by the way), beige is very "now", Mariah Carey ripped off the top super low rise jeans almost to the pubic bone are all very trendy, and large tote bags accompany every outfit.  And long painted toenails appear frequently.  And toenails like that are just just f*cking hideous. 

We wiled away many an hour, drinking Starbucks and toenail spotting in the mall.  Fabulous.  We also took in the psychedelic hippy art exhibition in Balboa Park's Museum of Contemporary Art. After our trip to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, wandering past the old homes of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, raking through masses of vintage clothes shops and hanging out at Amoeba Music, where I purchased a CD of the "Blind Boys of Alabama" and Symon bought "Fatty Fatty" (what?! who?!) it fit in nicely. 

But the highlight had to be the Hotel Del Coronado. A gorgeous old Victorian hotel, complete with its own ghost and was the setting for "Some Like it Hot", starring Marilyn, Jack and Tony Baby.  It even had a couple of old blokes snoring in the rattan chairs in the lobby, one had a newspaper over his face like Joe E. Brown.  Fabby -  atmosphere you can't buy.  Rates start at something like $350 per night, so we spent a hot sunny day, sipping "cactus juice" cocktails at the garden bar, walking round the landscaped gardens, checking out the pool, and generally pretending we were staying there.

The funny thing about hotels like this (and the Madonna Inn) is the awful shops they have. Not your usual newsagenty/touristy places packed with postcards and T shirts.  Oh no, rather shops selling gold-edged Chanel suits, ships in bottles, war regalia, rosewater tonics, oil paintings, initialled handkerchiefs, sun umbrellas, gold sandals, floral blouses, lighthouse models, pewter napkin rings, silver hipflasks (engraved if you so desire), shelves of brooches and tie pins...  All the things for the intrepid traveller in a safari suit and pith helmet, heading towards Kilimanjaro hunting damned Bengal tigers, eh what?!

Strangely enough, the Hotel Del Coronado also had a Harley-Davidson shop. I have never seen a Harley rider in a floral blouse or using napkin rings on the road. But who knows - what goes on on the road, stays on the road, man.

Continuing the theme of "what do rich folks get up to?", we rode off into the sunset past Death Valley and into Palm Springs -where the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Sonny Bono set up camp. With temperatures of 121 degrees (about 50c), with an army of those funny windmill things on the horizon, and palm trees that had brown leaves, we settled into our groundfloor poolside room.  Bliss.  Even Adelaide wasn't this hot.  And they play golf out here.  In this heat.  There's like 7 international golf courses in Palm Springs and those fairways are the only green things around these here parts, Cowboy.

The most fascinating thing for me, was the outside air-conditioning, at every restaurant and cafe patio. Oh, and the fact that I saw a woman dripping gold jewelry, wearing a fringed beige dress with "Hawaii" scrawled across it and a cowboy hat with strappy sandals and the sort of tan that screams "40 years of sun worship haven't heard of skin cancer".  Truly a Kodak moment under the rainmist air-conditioning at Starbucks.