I never thought I would end up moving to the Palm Springs area, but just a couple of life changes and a pandemic and here we are. We would always come here to visit my mother-in-law. The sun and low humidity were a welcome change from gray of the San Francisco Bay Area.
This desert was historically an outpost for wealthy retirees and weekenders from Los Angeles so being a car enthusiast it is always fun to see a Rolls Royce in the parking lot at the local supermarket. For my husband and I, this desert was always a vacation place; could we actually live here?
We came down the day before San Francisco issued a shelter-in-place order due to the Coronavirus. My mother in law, who is in her 70’s, was in need of some company and if things did continue to worsen, we felt better about knowing that we would already be there if something were to happen to her.
We left in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday in March not really certain what the future would hold and when we would be able to come back. We had done a lot of pandemic stocking so the car was filled mostly with food, one overnight bag of clothing each, and, of course, our aged poodle (going on 18 years strong) and all of his necessary supplies.
We drove straight through that evening, about 10 hours door-to-door. We made a couple of pit stops for us as well as our dog and also faced a snow delay as there was a fluke storm that hit The Grapevine closing it for several hours. Fortunately, by time we reached The Grapevine the snow had melted. We finally arrived in the desert late that night around 2am–exhausted but not really sure our nerves would let us sleep.
Our first night, we stayed in a hotel as the house we had rented for our first two weeks wasn’t ready for us. After moving into our rental house the next day, we began to process: we were here and our future was uncertain. We stayed around the corner from my mother-in-law, self-isolating to be sure that we were virus-free. Working remotely, we continued on with our lives as much as we could.