Palm Springs

This post includes some family history, which you might want to skip, but to me it is just a record of some of my thoughts sometime while we were travelling or settling in at home again last week. Now that I’m at my computer again, I will make this a little more detailed than I would have from the condo.
For anyone who has never been to Palm Springs, I know that pictures can give you the illusion that you are on a beautiful beach, but this is not the case. It is an oasis in the middle of a desert. I gather that the name gives away the reason why there is such beauty in this place and that there must be springs abounding, because water does not seem to be an issue. Anything that gets watered grows beautifully. The golf courses are among the top in the world and the landscapers take a lot of pride in creating the most amazing flower gardens.
I am not quite sure why we first decided to see this place, but it all began with a road trip in 1977 . . .



We went back when I was pregnant with Julene the following year and again when I was a couple of months along with Kristal. When Ben was a baby, we took the girls and left him with Oma and Opa. (The trip when one of the girls insisted, "I miss Benji RIGHT NOW!")

We continued driving down almost every Spring Break that the kids had, usually stopping off in L.A. to visit Knotts Berry Farm and/or Disneyland.
By the time the kids were in high school we had figured out how to make it down in a day and a half. The highlight was to come to the school with our car packed and the kids all skipping their final class so that we could make it to Medford that night. There were no bathroom breaks unless the car needed filling up and we could squeeze in a meal . . . maybe I could run across the street to order while the car was being filled up. We had a system going that the kids will probably laugh about now. Sometimes we met up with friends or family.

In some ways you could say we were spoiled and that we spoiled our kids, but it was still an economic way to do a vacation in the sun and a wonderful way for us to get away from the family business, which is hard to get away from when you stay close to home.

It didn’t come as a huge surprise to us when Kristal decided to do her final two years of study at Azusa Pacific University in Los Angeles. This is where she got to know Shaun. And one day the call came . . . you know the one . . . (daddy, I met a man in . . .)

In the Spring of 2002 we went down to meet him and we spent a few days together in Palm Springs. On this short trip, we celebrated Easter with them at the Marriott Hotel where he had been asked to lead worship for an outdoor church service. We were quite impressed!

Oh . . . and on this same weekend Shaun asked us for Kristal’s hand in marriage! I still can’t get over the whirlwind experience of that one! But another memory was made in Palm Springs!

A few years later, in 2004, Julene and her husband Chris were preparing to go overseas, and the base for their mission agency happened to be not far from Palm Springs. With Kristal and Shaun living in L.A. and Julene and Chris studying in Redlands, we decided that Palm Springs would be the final place for all of us to celebrate Easter and so we did!

It was later that year when Julene and Chris left for Indonesia with two little ones. And so 2004 was the last Easter that we were all together.

So, maybe knowing all of this makes Palm Springs a little more than just a holiday destination. It’s a place where memories have been made. Last week Shaun and Kristal joined us with their two little ones. It was a little like having them home. We cooked breakfast and lunch in the condo and enjoyed some dinners out. The grandkids were probably a bit confused about why we were living “somewhere else” ( in fact, Natalie did say that she liked our "other" house in Canada better) but the smiles we got from them, non-the-less, when they saw us were priceless!

If we had known 30 years ago . . . I don’t think I would have been able to process all of it. It’s a good thing God gives us one day at a time.