What part of IHOP is International?

"One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty." — Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle)

It’s amazing the difference daylight makes. By night, Palm Springs was a never ending Ramon Road with nothing but darkness and intersecting streets named after stars from a bygone era, but by day everything made sense – it was obvious, at a glance, where we’d gone wrong. Of course, the map we picked up from the lobby helped a bunch, too.

First port of call was a visit to IHOP, the somewhat optimistically named International House of Pancakes. For an International House, it’s interesting that only people in America get the opportunity to go, but then this seems to be a bit of an American thing: Baseball’s World Series is hardly a global pursuit of the same scale as it’s cricket World Series counterpart, and the previous night I’d passed a place called George’s, which apparently served its World Famous burgers (that I’d never heard of before). If it’s famous in America, if it’s famous just in Palm Springs, even if it’s just famous to others who live on the block, it’s World Famous, International, and a place of Global Renown.

IHOP, as is typically the case in the US, hardly skimps on its serves. I had a stack of four blueberry pancakes with blueberry sauce, cream, and a trio of as yet not entirely identified syrups drizzled over the top, for $7.99 – enough to stop  a horse. Even the kids serves were epic in nature – Elise ordered “baby cakes”, which consisted of a sausage, fried egg and five decent sized pancakes for around $4.50. “Coffee” means “bring me a pitcher of the stuff”, yet it was only $2.20 each. Unfortunately it was the weak link in the chain – the pancakes, however, were great.

On the way out I noticed yet another peculiarly American thing – in Australia, you’d have pancakes on their own, yet in the US they’re a side order and are typically served with bacon, eggs, hash browns, you name it. The mix of sweet and savoury on the one plate seems odd to me, but not to the locals. I’d be willing to have a crack (forgive me, arteries!), but I drew the line at one of their new promotions, sold with the strap-line “opposites do attract” – a serve of Belgian waffles and maple syrup, dished up with what looked like fried chicken. Pass.

It was time to head for the hills, up Highway 62 through Yucca Valley and on to Joshua Tree. When I’d visited seven years earlier I’d stayed at a hotel straight from 1961 – the Yucca Valley Inn and Suites, with a big triangular neon sign out the front, and within all the accoutrements of modern life. The highlights to me were an ice box near the pool that looked like it was designed by the same team responsible for the bright work on a 1958 Chevy, and the very classy and thoughtful touch of a bottle opener, bolted to the side of the bathroom vanity, within easy reach from the toilet. While you’re sitting on it. Very Jim Morrison, I thought. Unfortunately it looks like the relentless march of progress had claimed another victim, and I could find no sign of the Yucca Valley Inn and Suites. Bit of a pity, really.

We headed to the Joshua Tree National Park Visitors Centre and picked up a year-long National Parks pass, a map, guide book, and a couple of Junior Park Ranger books for the kids to complete, then headed up the slopes to the high desert, Joshua Trees, Yuccas, and mountainous heapings of boulders seemingly deposited at random. First stop was the Hidden Valley loop trail, where the objective of the Junior Park Ranger program apparently was not to help the littlies develop a love of the great outdoors, plants, animals and taking the time to slow down an experience nature, but instead to identify every animal and plant in the booklet, whether it was actually present or not. Elise was breathtakingly efficient, ticking off flowers that weren’t yet in bloom, animals that weren’t yet awake from a dormant winter, and probably species that didn’t actually even exist in the region. Jackson wasn’t far behind her, and between the two of them they’d spotted tarantulas, desert tortoises, squirrels and cactus wrens before we’d even stopped the car. Regardless, the walk was excellent, and just the right length – even this early in the year, you could feel the dryness of the air. In summer, it’d be like walking in a blast furnace.

We rounded out the day with a walk around Cap Rock (which had arguably the densest proliferation of Joshua Trees), a drive up to Keys View to the lookout over the San Bernadino Mountains and a sea of tobacco coloured smog blanketing Palm Springs, and did a couple of brief photographic recce’s at Sheep Ass (erm, Sheep Pass) and Skull Rock, on the way out of the park. We descended back into the valley, went to the 29 Palms Joshua Tree National Park Visitors Centre, and the kids were duly sworn in as Junior Park Rangers and presented with a couple of natty badges, the highlight of their day. After a brief search we picked up some accommodation at the Hotel 29 Palms - a really nice place, if you’re ever in the area (handy hint: they have fresh baked cookies at reception).

Therein a great day ended, and I embarked on an evening of photographic hell.

I’d decided to go up at sunset to take some photos of Joshua Trees, but my brain was wired to South Australian Summer Sunset Time, meaning if you got to where you were planning on taking photos at 7:00pm, you’d have an hour to wait. Here, of course, it’s still only early spring, so leaving 29 Palms at 5:10pm for a 35 minute drive to the location you want to photograph, only to discover sunset is at 5:48pm, is always going to end in tears. I got to Cap Rock, managed to fire off a couple of quick shots with sunset catching the uppermost branches of a couple of suitably photogenic Joshua Trees, and the sun promptly dipped below the mountains.

I figured I’d salvage a dud trip by doing a bit of timelapse, but of course this was just asking for more trouble. A lack of due diligence in my photographic composition means I should now have a wonderful timelapse of sunset on a composting toilet block, so I recomposed on something more interesting, only to put the camera in the wrong mode and take nothing but large raw+jpeg files, filling up my memory card in only a few minutes. Tempted to throw in the towel, I persisted, relocated the camera, and started again… only to do the exact same thing. Somewhat aggrieved (to put it politely) at having burned my way through 20Gb of Compact Flash cards, I shelved my plans for the evening and returned to the hotel, forlorn, to transfer God knows what, do some writing, wash away the tears with a Caol Ila, and attempt to improve on the entire situation with a very early start the following morning.