RATING: ♦♦♦♦♦
Palm Springs is one of our favorite places. We bought a timeshare here in the early 90s and visited often when we lived in California. It felt like a second home. But we sold our timeshare a few years ago. The last time we were here was in 2010, so it was great to get back.
Palm Springs itself is much the same as we remembered it, with a population of 50,000 and charming as ever. But the surrounding towns have really exploded. Indio, Cathedral City, and Palm Desert are all more populous than Palm Springs. Coachella, La Quinta, Desert Hot Springs, and Rancho Mirage aren’t far behind. All together, the Coachella Valley has a population of over 350,000. By California standards, not that big. But by any other measure, it is a full grown city.
Debbie and Reed accepted our invitation and came from Phoenix for a visit. The first day we had a little Superbowl party in our rig. The game was boring, but the company was fun.
On day two, we climbed up to Mount San Jacinto the easy way, taking the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, which is the largest rotating aerial tramway in the world. It was opened in September 1963 as a way of getting from the floor of the Coachella Valley to the top of San Jacinto Peak. The original cable cars were replaced in 2000 with rotating ones.
It takes twelve-and-a-half minutes to ride from the Valley Station at 2,643 ft to the Mountain Station at 8,516 ft above sea level. A narrator explained that the dramatic change in elevation is like traveling from the Sonoran Desert in Mexico to the Arctic Circle in Alaska.
The floor of the tramcar rotates constantly, making two complete revolutions on the way up so that the passengers can see in all directions without moving. It claims to be the largest of only three rotating aerial trams in the world.
When the weather is nicer, visitors can walk along nature trails or play in the snow during the winter months. But when we arrived, it definitely felt like Alaska. There was a full blown blizzard, so no hiking for us. But we had lots of laughs taking pictures and trying to keep from freezing our buns off. There are two restaurants at the summit, one of which specializes in fine dining, the other is a cafe. There are also two theaters, one showing a video of the history of the tramway and the other telling about the natural wonders around the peak.
We came back down to the desert floor and took a walk around downtown Palm Springs, where the weather was a sunny 70 degrees. Amazingly, the warm downtown is only a few miles from the blustery summit.
The downtown area still has much of its original 1950-60s style, when it was popular with the Hollywood crowd. It even has a Walk of the Stars on Palm Canyon Blvd similar to the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Blvd in Los Angeles. We saw Elvis and Marilyn, and a lot of other stars whose names we didn’t recognize.
The next day after breakfast we toured the Moorten Botanical Garden, which has specimens of nearly every cactus on earth. It’s a lot more interesting than it sounds. In between, we stopped at a local casino. Debbie was the lucky one, but we all had fun.
