Finally: The Vacation Report

The laundry is done, the mail (e- and U.S.) processed (work and home), and two things remain: the uploading of photos (update: done) and the blog entry.

First and foremost: If you have the chance to fly Song, do. 24 channels of DishTV, 1600 songs on demand, food (and martinis) for sale — and good enough to be worth buying — and an irreverent approach to the Standard Safety Spiel (a.k.a. "The Song of The Day"). The time spent in the air each way felt like nothing.

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Perfect Weather: 80s during the day, 60s at night. Palm Springs was much warmer — high 90s during the day — but we were also wearing significantly less clothing (swimwear!), and a quick dip in the pool would always suffice to cool off. The whole time, not a cloud in the sky. It was the kind of week that makes people move to the towns where they are vacationing.

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Happiest Place On... The park was stunningly decorated and refreshed for its 50th anniversary. They had clearly spent a lot of time cleaning and refurbishing to make it all look like new again. An added bonus, they had hidden 50 "Golden Mickey-head 50s" around the park in creative ways. It was kind of fun looking for these along the way.

One nice thing about having been visiting Disney parks for so long is that we weren't compelled to visit every single ride, no matter what. If a line was too long, we felt we could skip that ride for later.

Unfortunately, this was no minor feat. The park was jam-packed due to a school holiday weekend. Every time we wanted to go in to the parks, we waited about 20 minutes in line. This was nothing, however, compared with the lines inside the park. In Florida, you don't often see 2-3 hour waits for attractions, especially not in mid-October.

Some lines were long, of course, because the items were new. Space Mountain had been completely redone, with darker interior, new launch-and-reentry sequences, and new audio soundtrack. (I wish they'd at least add the soundtrack out here!)

Another long wait was for "Haunted Mansion Holiday," where they replace the traditional Haunted Mansion show with characters and sets from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Words can not adequately describe how cool this turns out, so I'll rely on someone else's photography to do the trick.

My longest wait of the stay, though, wasn't for a ride — it was for the fireworks show. By the time the show started on Sunday night, I'd been awake 21 hours (due to our flight into LAX). Dan gave out well in advance of the show and returned to the hotel to sleep. I sat it out, waiting (and nearly nodding off!) in front of the castle for roughly an hour — and it was well, well worth it. (This, coming from someone who can see — and hear — fireworks almost any night of the year, living so close to Orlando's theme parks.)

(As an aside: It was odd to realize that, in the middle of the city, I could see exactly five stars in the otherwise clear sky. Contrast this with Palm Springs, which apparently has a light-pollution ordinance — and the star-filled skies to show for it.)

Over at California Adventure, we felt even less interested in waiting for attractions, given how many are duplicated here in Florida. We did experience their Tower of Terror (different from ours, yet not necessarily better or worse), Golden Dreams (a feel-good movie of California history with a closing song by the fabulous Heather Headley) and the new Block Party Bash, a Pixar-themed parade (worth the trip across the Esplanade to see, if you're in the neighborhood).

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Try the gray stuff, it's delicious: Since this trip was ostensibly to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Dan and I meeting, we decided to splurge on a couple of nice dinners in Anaheim: One at Blue Bayou (inside Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland), and another at Napa Rose (at the Grand Californian Hotel, looking into California Adventure). Of course, while I enjoy going to restaurants with unique cuisine and creative presentation, Dan is still more of a chicken-fingers kind of diner. "Adventuresome" and "dinner" do not go together for him. End result: I enjoyed the meals immensely... and we will have a make-up anniversary dinner at somewhere a little more mainstream this week.

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Living the dream: After three days and nights at the world's playground for the young and the young-at-heart, we headed for a playground a little more child-free. If our stay in Anaheim was about fun and entertainment, Palm Springs was all about relaxing and being pampered. As we checked in to our small-scale hotel, our host offered to make a second trip to the local deli/bakery and get our lunch. (Each day, we selected lunch off a menu, and the hosts retrieved it and served it on plates — poolside or in our room, wherever we happened to be. The day we checked out, they called at 11 a.m., worried we hadn't placed an order — but we would be gone before the food came.)

Our hotel was very low-key, comfortable, sparsely populated, and nowhere near the kind of place from where titillating stories emerge. There was little to do but lay by the pool, read and stare up at the blue sky and the imposing mountains right at the edge of town. Our stay almost had a cruise-ship day-at-sea feel — except we were landlocked, in the desert.

Not that all the hotels are so laid-back. One hotel on our street was owned by an adult films producer; another itself as being for "adventurous gay men." Just for comparison, we toured a couple of other hotels — the one next door, although showing its age, was nicely landscaped. However, all the patrons by the pools were of retirement age, and were buck naked — save for a single piece of, um, jewelry, which, to a man, they were each wearing. (Tales of the City readers, think "It's an ornament. You hang it on your... tree.") That hotel struck us not so much "guesthouse" as "bathhouse" (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Even more amazing was how blatantly cruisy the street was after dark — and that close to the mountains, "dark" started at about 6:30 p.m. There were guys standing out in front of the hotels, and guys driving slowly by every few minutes, scoping things out. Very, very strange.

We ventured away from the hotel district only a couple of times: once to experience the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway once to experience the weekly nighttime Village Fest and farmer's market, and of course to locate dinner and evening entertainment.

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I Feel The Earth Move: Speaking of the Tramway: leave it to Dan to wonder about the effects of an earthquake when we're on the Aerial Tramway hanging from a cable roughly 1,500 feet between support towers, and again when we're at the top of a mountain looking down some 6,000 feet at the valley floor below. Thanks.

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It Was A Very Good Year: The evening goings-out were, shall we say, interesting. Whereas Dewayne's tried-and-true half-your-age-plus-seven dating formula seems to prove valid in most towns we visit, Palm Springs has their own rules. I think it's closer to "half your age minus 14." The number of (apparently) March-December romances was unusually high, and close-in-age local couples seemed the rarity (at least everywhere we went). We joked that, at one bar/cabaret, the bar stools were spaced to allow room for patrons' oxygen tanks. (This same venue was playing host to an entertainer who had retired from a bar in Chicago we saw last year.)

Would we go back? A qualified "yes." I enjoy Ft. Lauderdale more, because the guys there seem to be friendlier, and we enjoy going out in the evening there more. But there's tons more to do around Palm Springs during the day that we haven't done — Ft. Lauderdale has shopping and the beach... and it's still home, Florida. If we do go back, we'll try to fly in to Palm Springs, though, so we don't end the trip with a 3-hour drive to LAX.

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Everybody, Sing Along! In the zero-degrees-of-separation category: it turned out that one guy at our hotel was in Ft. Lauderdale for last year's swim meet (and was at our hotel for the welcoming cocktail party). He also attended this year's meet in Atlanta — which was hometown to another couple in our hotel, who were spectators at the meet.

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Everybody Goes To... On the way back to LAX and our red-eye flight home, we did a swing-through of Hollywood and surrounding environs. Dan was able to walk the (concrete) red carpet at the Kodak Theatre, home to the Oscars, and I got some snapshots of the Hollywood & Highland complex. You can tell Kodak was involved: the interior courtyard is rotated a bit off the true-square street grid to better frame photographs of the Hollywood sign. (Had we not been driving at the time, I would have taken pictures of the yellow-diamond street signs that officially declare, "No Access to the Hollywood Sign" along side streets between Hollywood and Burbank.)

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New Music Madonna Tuesday: To wrap the vacation, I started Sunday at Epcot's Food and Wine with Dewayne, Mark, Jerry and company, and ended it at T with Dan. You know you're at a gay bar when 2 different DJs each play the brand new Madonna single two days before it's released.

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(Oh, by the way: when I said to hold off on the tropical weather until we came back, I wasn't ASKING for any. Sheesh. Welcome home, indeed.)