Palm Springs: Land of the Golf Course

Growing up in Southern California, Palm Springs was always a legendary, iconic place, outside the greater LA metro area, but not “too far”. When I was old enough to visit, though, I found it …. well …. a little boring. I won’t bore you with the details (see what I did there?), but I do have fond memories of nearby Idyllwild and had also always heard good things about Joshua Tree National Park. As a result, when we were planning our first post-retirement “wintering,” Palm Springs seemed like a good place to try - I’m not sure it’s ever really cold there, it’s very pretty, and I kind of wanted to see what it was like now and how it was different from my youthful impressions.

Early in our visit here, we noticed one very obvious quirk of the area that I somehow missed before - pretty much every time we turned around, there was another golf course. We were not impressed, other than the fact that they were nice to look at and provided the only shade for miles (we don’t golf). On the other hand, everywhere we looked up from the golf courses, we got to enjoy some very pretty mountains.

And, of course, being us, we had to start climbing those mountains….

I also really enjoyed the desert flowers we saw - apparently, our timing was really good since we arrived at the start of spring - you can see a bunch of our favorites in the Desert Flowers post.

We learned that this year was even hotter than usual, with record or near record highs during most of our visit. We had more than a week of >100 degree weather at the beginning of March, with the average temp here for the whole stay probably significantly over 90 degrees. We learned some very important travel intelligence - you can flee Palm Springs by driving up one of the mountains to Idlyllwild, where it’s 20-30 degrees cooler, there’s a very cute town and great hiking, with amazing views (see details in the below photo captions). If you check out the Gallery of Extras, you’ll even find photo evidence of surprise snow from our last hike there in mid-April!

Idyllwild is 5,000 feet above Palm Springs and the drive up the mountain is gorgeous.

There are several overlooks with glorious views along the way.

Idyllwild - a very cute town with several restaurants with good food. There’s even a brewpub.

This is a commemorative statue for the town.

The Ernie Maxwell Trail was our favorite in the area and we did it several times while there.

Beautiful views from the trail.

Loved the huge granite boulders along the way.

Some joker put this stick up - too funny.

Another joker! J/K, she’s family.

Could not believe these views. And the weather was so good.

More granite - we were not up to that hike.

This hike was almost too much for me.

It’s hard to see, but we actually needed to scramble over the boulders to get down from the summit.

But, the payoff!

More boulders.

There’s also plenty of fun activities in the area. Our two favorites were the local hockey team and the zoo. The Coachella Valley Firebirds are the farm team for the NHL Seattle Kraken. Their stadium was another really nice smaller stadium, with a LOT of luxury boxes, and, I guess because they are not restricted by normal NHL stadium contracts (maybe?), they had great drink and food options (including craft donuts!!). I also really liked their entrance shenanigans.

The Living Desert Zoo & Garden was great, with these amazing sitting areas purposely designed for people to sit comfortably for awhile and soak in the animals and peaceful displays. Some had rocking chairs and some had footrests. My two favorite animals were the shy giraffe (hiding behind the tree far, far away from the crowds) and the cheetah, who was napping in the sun and then jumped to attention when he noticed the…“toddler!” More info in the captions below.

This enormous enclosure held lots of different animals and birds.

You had to look hard to find them all.

The giraffes were a big hit, and the food was a big hit with them!

But there was this one giraffe hiding behind a tree in the distance.

He was my favorite. Note he is also facing away. lol

Warthog

Cool raptor.

The dromedaries were very cool. And we got to see them fed.

They had an obvious pecking order about who ate where.

Hidden cheetah.

His posture completely changed when he saw a toddler.

The restaurant had surprisingly good food for a zoo.

And we had a view of the bighorn sheep enclosure from the restaurant. Can you see any?

Here’s one!

Another local Lozofsky favorite was Joshua Tree National Park - everything looked so different there than any other national park we’ve been to (and no, I never made it there growing up in LA). The landscape looked kind of like a giant toddler threw around some rocks or made sand castles. And in some places, it looked a lot like a set for the old Land of the Lost TV show (where are the sleestak?!?!) or maybe a desert section of Disneyland or some other amusement park. Throw in the overabundance of Joshua Trees and it definitely did not look like this planet.

For more photos, see the Gallery of Extras.