Day #2 in Southern California: I Did Not Die in the Desert, But It Was Definitely a Possibility

If you wanted to die due to your own stupidity, the desert would actually be a great place to do it!

Also the mountains, if you're a stumbly type of person.

Fortunately the mountains weren't being particularly stumbly on this day, the day that we woke up early and drove up Palomar Mountain, leaving behind a misty, foggy morning at sea level and ending up in clear skies and views all the way to the misty, fog-covered Pacific Ocean. 

I felt super lucky that exactly one day of our trip overlapped with the summer dates of Palomar Observatory's guided tours, in my opinion an absolutely unmissable $5-per-person experience. But first, the visitor center!

Shout-out to strong female role model Margaret Burbidge!

You KNOW you want to know about all the potentially hazardous asteroids out there, as well as how close they're always coming to hitting us!

How many of these impact craters can you say you've visited? I've seen Berringer and Chicxulub!

I thought this display was super interesting--Palomar Observatory is still in heavy use, and this graphic shows the parts of the light spectrum that it can observe. All its projects, then, are stuff that fits within that specific spectrum--and there are so many projects!

A nice thing about showing up in time for the first tour of the day--and arriving pretty early for that, as well, ahem--is that we had the place nearly to ourselves, and there was nobody in the way of all my beautiful observatory views on the walk over to see it up close!

Selfie with Palomar!

I don't recall who was holding my proper camera for me while I was in selfie mode, but later I found this in my photo roll:

I am devastated to have to tell you that I did not see a SINGLE RATTLESNAKE ON MY ENTIRE TRIP! Later that day in the desert I was sure that every step I took would be the one that would bring me within rattling distance of a rattlesnake, but there was ne'er a rattle to be had, sigh...

And yes, I did take a new photo of Palomar Observatory at every step. It's just so pretty!

I don't know what I was really expecting for my $5 guided tour of Palomar Observatory, but it was honestly not getting to go INSIDE the observatory itself to get a close-up view of the telescope!

It's too big to actually see all in one frame, so my photos are just bits and pieces of the whole:

There's a giant mirror in there, a cage that an astronomer can sit in (but never does), and the machinery that moves the telescope.

Here you can kind of see the track that the dome rotates upon. There are physical marks all around the inside to align it properly:

We even got to go upstairs and walk on a catwalk circling the inside of the dome to see the telescope even closer:

Probably my most favorite photo of myself ever. I look so happy, lol!

During the tour, there were some guys who just KEPT asking questions about where one could conceivably go to see the telescope open up after dark. Such and such hiking trail, maybe? Or parking at this one particular campsite and walking onto the observatory grounds? Every time, the docent would be like, "There is NO way for the public to see the telescope in action. The observatory grounds close at dusk, there's no close vantage point from public land, etc., etc." Afterwards, walking back to the car, we were all, "Sooo... those old guys are going to try to sneak back into the observatory tonight, right?"

Although to be fair, omg I would LOVE to see the observatory doors open. That would have to be about 1000 times more magical than seeing them closed, and look how magical they look closed!

The beauty of having an activity that ends mid-morning is that you then still pretty much have the ENTIRE DAY to do more sightseeing! So even though the next place I wanted to go was another hour-plus away from the top of Palomar Mountain, we still arrived at the town nearest to it in time for an early lunch.

And then, it was off to see the giant sculptures of Galleta Meadows!

The sculptures are interspersed among the desert landscape north and south of the town of Borrego Springs, and when I was originally planning this part of the trip I thought we'd probably park the car somewhere central-ish--because I don't think we're meant to drive our rental car across the literal desert, ahem--and then just walk around between the sculptures that interested us.

And at first, that worked out great. Stepping out of the air-conditioned car into the 115-degree desert air felt like stepping into a clothes dryer--baking hot, with a baking hot wind blowing extra baking-hot air onto my face--and I LOVED it. It felt soooo warm and comfy, like sitting wrapped in a wool blanket in front of a hot fire on a cold night. All my muscles relaxed immediately, the tension that I constantly carry in my shoulders just immediately gone. I literally announced, "I LOVE it here. Omg I want to buy a house right here and live in the desert forever this feels so good."

So happy as a clam, I did walk between the first few sculptures, and then posed people to take their photos and took more close-up photos of the interesting way that metal rusts and the contrast of the sculptures and the landscape, etc. There were some great clouds. The sky was delightfully blue. The kid continued in her lifelong ambition to touch cacti and then regret it:

But I dunno, after a few minutes my body was still feeling great, all warm and cozy and happy, but my mind started to increasingly become filled with doom. I was plodding through the sand on the way to another giant sculpture in the distance, not tired at all and not sweaty and actually super comfortable, but inside my head I was like, "Huh. Am I about to die? I kind of think I'm about to die."

After a while, I was like, "Hey, does anyone else here feel like they are actually genuinely about to die?", and my partner was all, "Cool, cool, I'm gonna go bring the car around, okay?"

From then on, we drove between groups of sculptures...

Okay, based on the color of my skin in this photo, I probably was a little closer to dying than not dying. 

Surely this serpent is everyone's favorite sculpture. It was definitely mine!

Its spiny undulations actually continue across the road, and it's definitely the most interactive, with lots of serpenty bits to peek around and climb under:

Excepting the serpent, my favorite sculptures were in the slightly wilder, clearly less visited section south of town. Instead of bare ground, we drove down trails bordered by all kinds of cacti:

Because if you didn't get too close to a cactus or ten, were you even in the desert?!?

The best dinosaur sculptures are also in the south section:

I was trying to make it look like the dinosaur was about to eat me, but tbh I'm not sure what I actually got.

By late afternoon, we'd only seen about half of the 100+ sculptures, but we'd definitely put enough unsanctioned off-road miles on our rental car, so we headed back to civilization, taking a different route that led through some former gold mining towns turned tourist stops.

Another important trope: if you don't find yourself drinking a flight of local hard ciders, each one more unappealing than the last (come on--GRAPEFRUIT cider?!?), in a hipster cidery off the highway, are you even on vacation in California?

Tomorrow, we go to San Diego Zoo to see the pandas!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!