Palm Springs, A Holiday Face

Unlike the Napa Valley flight, we rise to a very high altitude. The horses, that were in the fields look like ants, as do the cars roaring along the roadways. We are in the Thermal/La Quinta area of the desert. To the south we see . the huge blue, man made Salton Sea, under a glowing pink sky. The mountains to the east are still bathed in yellow light and we can see, the dark shadow that is the San Andreas Fault. The sun is setting behind the Mountains to the West, as their color changes from an earthy pink to purple then black.

The landscape below, is a patchwork of different colors and textures. The tall date palms look like miniscule shrubs. The scene is so interesting, each patchwork different from the rest. It is almost too much to take in. Four other balloons were launched as we were and we can see them,four small dot, in the distance and as we get closer we see the Intermittent flares as the gas is lit to raise the balloons even higher.

We notice we are starting to descend and as the patches get bigger and bigger some of them look like abstract paintings. It's as if they were painted by a crazed Mother Nature. They are awesome! Some barren, clay-like rectangles of land have strange markings. At least one has rows of perfect circles. We dub them crop circles as someone hums the otherworld theme.

We drop to just a few feet above a field and start moving horizontally and more quickly. Apparently they do this to move in another direction. Here you can feel the movement as we cross the field. It is a very different feeling than our vertical ascent. We move faster and just as it appears that we are going to bump into a huge grove of date palms, with the flick of a switch we float slowly upward. The fronds of the palms are very close and very big. We rise to and on top of them. It is an interesting perspective from the top of the palm. As we rise again to the sky, the trees again get smaller and smaller.

We float around until it gets dark then we slowly drop down into a pure white square, that has

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