"Out Where the Dreams Are High, Out Where the Wind Don't Blow"

Playing: A Dustland Fairytale-The Killers (That's where the title is from.)
Reading: Ugly Guide to the Uglyverse by David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim

For this season, in terms of style, I'm really into this retro, desert vibe (that you can see in the music video I linked and in Rumi Neely's Coachella 2012 Photo Diary), so I took a day trip out to the desert to get inspired and to just have a day to look around with my family. We stopped off at a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the middle of our drive at some small town that had an all you can eat deal. I haven't seen a KFC buffet, since the 1990's, so of course we had to go. I tried the Kentucky Grilled Chicken for the first time, which actually wasn't all that bad.

We took the gondola to go up and explore the national park, but I'll talk about that later. What I wanted to show you was the beautiful view way up high. The desert sky is just such a clear blue and it seems to stretch on forever with the actual town of Palm Springs in grids down below.

I liked this cactus quite a bit and how it was all by itself in a patch of pinky-grey rocks. The pastel yellow needles look very nice with the pastel pink rocks and I just like the way it looks. It kind of irritates me that someone piled rocks on top of the cactus because it looks like the cactus has giant, pink dandruff...

The landscape is pretty sparse with only some green popping up, mostly around small creeks and wherever humans have planted them. And then the mountains are so odd, looking like a pile of gravel that could tumble down and fall apart at any moment. There's just something about these mountains that amazes me. Maybe it's how they never look that large in pictures or from far away, but when you get close to them, they're absolutely enormous.

My favorite part of the desert are the wind farms. I love the tall tooth pick-like structures that look like sleek pinwheels. I've always been fascinated by them. One time, I was driving by this huge white fin object that was probably as tall as my house and then I realized it was one of the spokes from one of the wind farms' giant pinwheels. It's just funny to see these dotting the landscape.

Oh, and today was my last day of school, but on a more important note, I want to wish a very happy birthday to one of my favorite musicians, Brandon Flowers! He's turning 31 today and I think the perfect gift for him would be to vote for "Mr. Brightside" for the 100 Greatest songs of NME's Lifetime, so click here to vote! Thanks for reading and look out for my next desert post!