chatted as though we were all visiting at a friend’s house.
Canadians Colin and JJ Hill, who had come to celebrate their 35th
wedding anniversary, told the kinds of stories travelers tell – like the
time they were pulled over in Mexico by police “collecting for a school
charity.” JJ reached in the glove box and handed them a roll of bills,
then told Colin, “Get going! Step on it!” She had given the police a wad
of promotional bills from a Canadian tire store. “At least they had the
president’s face on them,” observed Colin. “Yes,” JJ said, “the president
of the tire company!”
In the morning, we sat down for a three-course breakfast in a dining
room with an ornately frescoed ceiling and a fireplace clad in 300-year-
old Spanish tiles. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, a 50-foot-high
waterfall tumbled down a native rock cliff.
Later, we walked out the inn’s iron gate and around the corner to
the Palm Springs Art Museum – where we promptly ran into our evening
innkeeper, Daniel. He doubles as a museum volunteer and greeted us
warmly.
Feeling dwarfed in the vast open lobby, we gazed up at a colorful
sculpture fashioned of glass tubes and tendrils by the celebrated artist
Dale Chihuly. We admired western paintings by Edgar Payne and Joseph
Sharp. In the excellent museum café, we got a tip to head to the third
floor and look for a giant stack of plates. “Walk around them to see
something magical.”
Artist Robert Therrien had created 1950s dinner plates of a
ludicrously exaggerated size and stacked them in what appeared to be a
precarious manner, a tower eight feet high. Walking around them created
the strange optical illusion that the tilted rims were wobbling and the
plates about to fall. The piece both created a Pop Art effect and invited
a good laugh.
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TRAVEL
