Palm Springs was: steak frites, Kir Royale, trying to escape the boring table, Pacifico in the hot tub, too many cigarettes, going over financials while eating bacon, stealing teeny tiny bottles of Tabasco, lots and lots of coffee, the most expensive manicure ever, beautiful windy skies, dry lips, champagne, white terry robes, teaching my co-workers how to crochet, laughing, sleeping hard on soft pillows, feeling glad I don't work with a bunch of suits, sipping warm bourbon from a flask in the backseat while racing home on the 10.

I drove out on Wednesday with three guys I work with, in a huge old Ford LTD. The driver is a man with a plan. He has a trucker stove, which is like a little crock pot that can be plugged into the cigarette lighter. You can cook different things in it depending on the length of your trip. He has made brisket before, but since our trip was going to be relatively short, he decided to do a meatloaf. He'd also dreamed of doing some engine block cooking so we decided on potatoes and butternut squash, wrapped in foil and strapped to the engine with wire.

The meatloaf smelled amazing after an hour of driving, but we had to move the potatoes and squash to a hotter part of the engine because they weren't cooking at all. After forty-five more minutes, on the outskirts of Palm Springs, we decided to pull over and eat. The tires rolled onto the soft sand of the shoulder and we got out of the car, taking our paper plates and meatloaf with us. We pulled sodas from the cooler and sadly undercooked potatoes from under the hood. The squash was fine, especially sprinkled with brown sugar, pinched straight from the box with our meaty-sticky hands. The meatloaf was perfect -- tender and oniony and full of pure meat flavor. We gobbled up hunks of it, paper plates resting on the massive trunk of the car, and then picked at the scraps left at the bottom.

We cleaned up, stuffing our trash in the trunk, and poured little nips of Jim Beam into our half-full soda cans. Two of the guys lit up cigars as we started up the car and, as we pulled onto the road in our huge car under the pink, setting-sun sky, I sipped my whiskey + soda and felt so perfectly happy.