Desert Sessions
- CARAVAN HALEN
- May 7, 2019
- 6 min read
Hello everybody. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin. Hope you’ve had a nice week - we’ve been having a very nice, and very warm time in the desert. Here’s what we’ve been up to:
I really, really like the desert. It’s both desolate and beautiful, and the extreme weather adds a layer of danger and excitement. I don’t know if I could handle living here, especially given it’s only spring and the heat is hard work, but it’s an awesome place to spend a week or so.
G&S met up with us for the weekend in Mojave and Palm Springs, and we had a couple of fun cookouts at the van. In Mojave we visited the Air and Spaceport, home of both the start and finish of the first non-stop flight around the world in the 80s, and more recently a lot of the development of the soon-to-launch passenger space shuttles.
Palm Springs is hot! Late April was about as late as you’d want to visit before the temperature becomes unbearable: their high season is winter, and a few places were starting to shutter up. We managed to fluke a slightly cooler couple of days, but it was still early to mid 30s. The establishments along Palm Boulevard, the touristy main strip, all have fans blowing cooling mist at passers-by.
Palm Springs has some awesome examples of mid-century modernist architecture, although you need to do a bit of bit of a tiki tour into the ‘suburbs’ to see the best. The ‘Elvis honeymoon hideaway’ is probably the most impressive we saw, and is on the market if you’ve got a spare US$3.2m
A fun attraction in Palm Springs is the aerial tramway, which goes up Mt San Jacinto at a fairly alarming angle to 8500 ft (2/3 of a Mt Cook, comparison fans) in a car that rotates, which would be lovely if you weren’t holding the world’s wriggliest baby. It was 33 degrees at the bottom and 12 at the top: you get quite good at packing layers for the kids but this was tough to accommodate.
We once stayed in an Ace Hotel in Portland, OR, and loved it, and there’s another one in Palm Springs. It was impractical and budget-unfriendly to try and stay at the hotel, but Bo had a birthday-prezzie massage and we all had a cracking meal in their excellent diner, which also had a bloody great beer list. The Ace does textbook hipster cliché perfectly, and I don’t mean that as anything other than a massive compliment.
Joshua Tree National Park is a short drive north of Palm Springs. It’s a compelling landscape, with millions of the eponymous low-rise trees dotted everywhere, alongside crazy rock formations. We found a great hike that was just the right length for Mo, who spent the whole walk marching ahead, exclaiming “I am the leader to the chipmunk forest!”, as one does.
There are a whole lot of massive wind turbines in this part of the world, which are both fascinating to look at, and explain why we kept getting nearly blown off the road. They’re a bit disquieting: the neat rows of turning blades remind me of the marching hammers in The Wall.
A classic American roadside attraction is at Cabazon, just west of Palm Springs: two giant dinosaurs, as featured in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. There’s a bunch of others if you pay the admission fee, but the original brontosaurus and T-Rex are the freebies to lure you in.
Part of the drive from Palm Springs to Death Valley is along I-15, the long, straight, and pretty dull highway from LA to Vegas. We stayed on the interstate this time, but we did this drive in reverse on the frontage roads 15 years ago on our Route 66 odyssey. It was fun seeing some familiar sites: kooky roadside attractions and ‘Burma shave’ style advertising on the side of the highway.
I have always wanted to visit Death Valley, home of the hottest recorded temperature, 57 degrees C. It was a bit of a headscratcher for trip planning purposes: as you can imagine, you don’t want to go in the height of summer, and we were a bit worried that it would still be too hot even in spring. Like Palm Springs, we lucked into a couple of slightly ‘cooler’ days – a high of just 37. That’s still too hot to do much hiking, especially with kids, so a lot of our time there was in the car with the air con on full! Bo had a decent trek into the Badwater basin while I stayed in the truck with the girls.
It’s a fascinating place, strangely beautiful and far from just being an arid desert. We saw badlands, Sahara-style sand dunes, massive salt flats at the lowest point in the US (80m below sea level, fact fans), and strangely coloured canyons.
Mo proudly collected her junior ranger badges at Joshua Tree and Death Valley. The park rangers seem to genuinely love inducting the kids into the programme, and always take 5 minutes or more to grill the prospect on the answers in their workbook to make sure they’re worthy of the badge.
It’s a short drive from Death Valley across the Nevada state line to Las Vegas. Vegas is a truly ridiculous place, and our 36 hours there was probably about right. Walking down the Strip is an entertaining people watch whatever time of day, with a lot of undies/togs confusion, day-drunkenness, and admirable if slightly unwarranted body confidence.
The mix of tourists in Vegas is probably the most diverse and representative sample of America we've seen so far. The Northwest seemed very white, and we visited a few primarily Hispanic or black areas of California; it's funny that the thing to promote a healthy mixture of ethnicities is the promise of getting munted together on day-glo margaritas through a straw from a giant plastic glass shaped like a high heel.
The iconic set pieces outside the big casino hotels are fun for all ages. Mo was a big fan of the Venetian’s canals, Treasure Island’s pirate ship, and the Bellagio fountains, but found the volcano show at the Mirage completely terrifying.
Vegas is a sensory overload for grown adults, let alone kids. We probably shouldn’t have been surprised that multiplied by baking hot weather, lots of walking, and wonky mealtimes, it led to an all-time record-breaking 4.y.o. meltdown on the way home, including Dad getting punched in the balls to the amusement of passers-by.
We stayed at the RV Park at Circus Circus, and it was a nearly half hour walk (family pace, probably 8 minutes otherwise) through the casino to the Strip. We were crossing our fingers that Kitty’s first steps wouldn’t be inside a casino in Las Vegas, although she got some pretty dirty feet trying. Ewww.
The Neon Museum in Vegas is great: a collection of decommissioned neon signs from casinos, hotels, restaurants etc from various eras.
We’re now in Utah, about to embark on a couple of weeks of serious National Parking…
BEERWATCH: California has some great breweries, and most grocery stores and restaurants have a good selection. We’ve been working through the who’s who of west coast craft brewing, so there are some heavy hitters up for selection in this edition. Bronze goes to the venerable Firestone Walker for the very ambitious Rosalie, which attempts to make a beer that tastes like a rosé, via grape juice and hibiscus additions to some kind of a Belgian sour base, and kind of manages it. Silver goes to ‘Staff Magician’, from the even more revered Mikeller’s San Diego operation, ordered from the cracking list at the Ace diner. Gold goes to an absolute belter of a beer, Stone’s ‘Tangerine Express’, with a whole lot of tangerine rind that adds an intruiging layer of pithy bitterness to an already meaty IPA. It’s my second favourite beer of 2019 so far (after – shameless plug alert – the recently released & Skittles ‘Tom Shady’ New England IPA, available at a Mac’s Brewbar near you for a limited time, NZ readers).
MOMO’S PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: We are expanding this section to encompass other stuff that the young ‘uns like, such as pools. The Palm Springs KoA pool gets a good review for at least being open, after a succession of tempting pools that were still mothballed until proper summer. Guest editor Kitty rated the Circus Circus pool highly for lots of steps to be walked up and down, over and over and over. Mo’s gold medal goes to the M&Ms store on the Vegas Strip, on account of it being four floors of chocolate.
TUNEWATCH: My phone is half full of songs, and half full of Mo’s audio books, which makes for an interesting time on shuffle. I’m fairly confident that no-one else in the world has ever heard a chapter from Enid Blyton’s “The Magic Faraway Tree” immediately followed by A Tribe Called Quest.
SUPERMARKET SWEEP: Palm Springs has a Trader Joe’s, which is a whole lot of fun. It’s best described as a boutique hipster Aldi: pretty much everything is home brand, but good quality and often quirky and unusual.
Another great post. Love reading about what you have all been up to.