Friday, October 22, 2021

Lori and I tend to get up relatively early on these trips. This morning we were up at 7:15 ready for coffee. We each have certain protein or breakfast bars we like, and Lori often makes yummy scrambled cheesy eggs, which was what she did today. Mornings are a favorite part of our days on these trips; we are both on laptops writing, sorting pictures, and researching and planning for the day ahead. Lori is far and away the best at finding interesting things for us to do on GWs, and often is scouring the internet for weeks prior to our trips. Today, she informed me that we are apparently in date country. Not the awkward ritual of two people beginning a series of meetings to get to know each other better kind of date, but dates as in the fruit. Dates apparently only thrive in very dry, sunny places where plenty of water is accessible. Therefore, there are dozens of date farms down here. I knew next to nothing about dates except that they are delicious when stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon, and Lori had never even tasted a date before. Clearly, this was an excellent learning opportunity. For various reasons, we chose Shields Date Garden as the place to go to increase our date knowledge.

After a leisurely morning, we showered, dressed, filled our Camelbaks, grabbed snacks and whatever else we needed for the day, and set off for the date garden. As always, it seems impossible to adequately describe these unique and strangely wonderful places we manage to find in each state we visit. Shields Date Garden (est.1924), is primarily a date farm, producing many varieties of dates, including but certainly no limited to Medjool, Blonde, Brunette, Abbada, Barhi…and the list goes on. The palms (did anyone else have NO idea that dates grew on palm trees?!) at this place were not just planted in traditional farming rows; rather, they were artistically placed in garden settings. All kinds of desert plants, bushes, and trees were mixed and mingled in with the date palm trees. In 2011, a wealthy couple who had created a biblical garden in Vancouver, Canada, were looking to relocate the garden statues to the Palm Springs area. Shields incorporated the statues (chronologizing the life of Christ) and created a walking path that winds through the 17 acres of the date farm.

We learned amazing things in this place! Raise your hand if you already knew the following (I would not be raising my hand for any of these things!):

·         Dates are one of the most expensive and work intensive crops to grow and cultivate.

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For best results, all steps of date production have to be done by hand.

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There is no natural pollination process for dates, so they must also be pollinated by hand! This involves shaking the pollen out of the male tree flowers, gathering it into squeezy bottles (picture bigger versions of those little nose and ear cleaning bulbs for babies), climbing the female trees on skinny, scrawny little wooden ladders, and then shooting the male pollen out onto the female fruit through the squeezy bottle nipples. Sounds just like sex, right!?? Strange, human assisted, tree sex. It’s like in vitro for fruit.

·         About half of each huge bunch of dates is cut out of the middle of the bunch and sacrificed so that the rest can reach top quality status.

·         Too much rain will kill the dates, so each bunch (EACH BUNCH ON EACH TREE!) must be hand-wrapped in a waterproof cover to protect them from the rain during the rainy season.

·         Dates grow on palm trees!! I thought only coconuts grew on palm trees.

Shields Date Garden encompasses the date farm, the gardens and biblical walk, an outdoor event space, a small movie theater where we learned all about the romance and sex life of dates, an inside café, an outside café, a gift shop, and… a soda fountain. And at that soda fountain one can purchase something so delicious, so triumphant, that my mouth is watering just thinking about it. A date shake. Yes, a milkshake made with dates. Mr. Shields, the founder, created a way to dry and crystallize dates to make a sugar substitute. When these crystals are blended with ice cream and milk, sweet creamy heaven emerges. Really. I want one right now.

Oh, I forgot to tell you—this morning, before we left for the day, we realized that we had forgotten to toss the states last night. So, Lori did the first toss. Twenty state puzzle pieces went into the bowl. Only eight landed face up. Still in the running for next year are: Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Alabama, South Carolina, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.

After exploring almost everything Shields Date Farm had to offer (we skipped having lunch at the café in order to better and more fully enjoy our date shake), we set off for Joshua Tree National Park (JTNP). We decided not to purchase new tickets online and instead to plead with the gate ranger to let us use the picture of Lori’s annual pass that she has on her phone. This turned out to be unnecessary, as there was not even a pay gate at the southern entrance of the park. There was a visitor’s center selling park passes, and we went in, but were told that we would be asked to see our pass on the way out of one of the other two entrances to the park, and we could ask about the picture there. Fine with us, so we went back to the car to begin our first drive through the park.

JTNP spans two deserts. The southern half, where we entered, is in the Colorado desert. There were some interesting cacti, lots of desert floor, and many huge mountains of small (tennis ball sized) to large (basketball sized) rocks. HUGE mountains of them, as if Gulliver had offloaded handful after handful of different sized pebbles down into the land of the Lilliputians. As we continued to drive north, and the Colorado desert transitioned into the Mohave, the mountainous piles of smaller rocks disappeared, and suddenly the landscape was filled with heaping hills of enormous, awe-inspiring, differently shaped boulders.

Rocks are a main feature of JTNP, making me a very happy camper. I absolutely love rocks. More than once, Lori has had to stop me from pausing to stare and marvel at rocks so that we could get to where we were going. Anyway, JTNP is full of gorgeous rocks of all sizes, the result of volcanic activity underground. According to the information on our park map, a special form of granite magma rose up from deep inside the earth, broke through overlying rock, and then cooled and crystallized underground, causing horizontal and vertical cracks to form. The granite kept rising up and came into contact with ground water. The resulting chemical reactions widened the cracks and rounded the edges, and the results were these wonderful boulders that were left piled all on top of each other as the earth eroded.

We made three stops on this initial venture into the park. First, we stopped at the Cholla Gardens, which were in the Colorado Desert side. Almost out of the blue, fields of cholla cacti seemed to spring up from the ground where 20 yards earlier there had been none. Lori and I loved (carefully!) walking through and looking at these smallish cacti, which seemed to have quite a lovable quality to them. They appear fuzzy, cute, and huggable, but the hugging would not last long, as they are completely covered with sharp needles. After walking the marked path through the Chollas, we drove further north. Soon after the landscape shifted to become full of the huge boulders, we stopped again to take pictures, and I just had to go climb up on a couple of rocks to enjoy the better view.

Our final stop was to visit the well-known Arch Rock, an area with boulders forming a natural arch on top of other boulders. This place is particularly gorgeous at the time of day we went, about half an hour before sunset. We were a bit disappointed to discover that all the great pictures one can find online of people standing under the arch must be taken from the vantage point of another pile of boulders across from it. I was having a good ankle day, and made it up to stand under the arch, but Lori’s knees and feet have been misbehaving lately, and she was too smart to risk the climb up onto the Arch Rock, or onto the boulders across from it to take pictures. I was able to get someone else to take a picture of me, and Lori and I were able to wave to each other from high and low rocks, but sadly, the angle just wasn’t available for Lori to actually see through and take a good photo of Arch Rock from the ground.

After leaving Arch Rock we drove back to the apartment, I started writing the journal, and Lori made dinner. After dinner we shared all our pictures, called the hubbies, and watched one-and-a half episodes of Squid Game, before deciding to go to bed. It was time to perform the day’s second tossing of the states, my turn this time. After the toss there were three puzzle pieces remaining, but they represented five states. One of the pieces contains Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey, which are all too small to have pieces of their own. The other two states still in the running are Missouri and Arizona. Lori is rooting for Arizona because she’s never been. I would like to go to Missouri. As always, it doesn’t matter where we go. I swear, we would manage to have a great time sitting in a rain ditch, enjoying each other’s company. Good night!