Girls' Day Out

Today my friend Lori (former Curves owner) and I celebrated Halloween with a Girls' Day Out. I met Lori at her house at 7am, which is a bit early for a Friday off, and we set off towards our destination of Palm Springs. The weather was cloudy, cool, and a few sprinkles here and there. It felt just like fall, as it should. Lori suggested that we make a stop at her favorite breakfast location east of LA, which is the Farmhouse in Banning, CA.



The Farmhouse is pure Americana. For those of you who have been to a Cracker Barrel, it's pretty much a privately-owned version of one of those, complete with an adjoining antiques shop. They have a huge menu with everything from hearty breakfast platters to chicken fried steak to ... Mexican food? Yeah, not sure about that, but everything else looked awesome. They make their own pies and desserts and the cinnamon rolls looked to be the size of a small baby. What I found endearing was they are so non-commercial that they don't even have dessert boxes with their logo on it. Someone actually takes the time to write their name and draw a logo on every pie box by hand! Anyway, seeing the gigantuan portions that other tables were getting, we opted to share a Western omelette with home fries, wheat toast, and a half order of biscuits and gravy. Oh yeah baby! Biscuits and gravy are one of my guilty pleasures. Turns out, same for Lori! They were literally the best I have had in California. I sometimes make my own version on "Football Sundays", but these were way better. Almost worth the drive in itself. Although, I'm not sure how any one person could eat all that we got though. It was 4 biscuits with at least a pound of sausage gravy on a giant platter. And that's a HALF order!

After breakfast, our destination was going to be Agua Caliente casino in Palm Springs. But then we saw Morongo. Since neither of us had been there, we decided to stop and check it out. It was nicer than I thought it would be and you could see that they were really trying to be like a Vegas casino. The casino floor was huge, but 98% of the machines were the video slots, which Lori and I don't play. We found video poker over in one teeny section, so we played for a couple hours, both breaking about even. We finally found several banks of brand new video poker machines waaaay back in a corner. Video poker doesn't give the house as much advantage as the mindless slot machines, so that's why they can be harder to find. We played over there for a few more hours and enjoyed a few beers and generally just had a great time. So much so that we decided to leave Agua for another adventure. I wish I could say that we won or hit a royal, but it didn't happen. It was just good times with good company.