Our business in Palm Springs was conveniently concluded by noon, which left us a good (and hot) chunk of the day to explore Palm Springs.  As I noted earlier, there’s not a lot happening in the summer, but the heat of summer presents a terrific opportunity to ride up to Mt San Jacinto on the famous Palm Springs Aerial Tramway.

Down in the valley it was about 108 degrees, but the Tramway hauls you up to 8,500 feet in about 10 minutes where the air is cool and the pine trees are tall.  Best of all, the tram cars have been updated in the past few years, and now the floor rotates as you go up. Think about that for a second:  you’re floating up diagonally as steeply as 42 degrees over craggy rocks and impossible canyons, swaying as the tram car passes over towers, and slowly rotating all at the same time.  It’s an amazing sensation.

It’s also a disconcerting sensation at first, so I quickly put the camera down and focused on just acclimating to the ride.  There’s a lot to see and the 10 minutes passes quickly.

With the windows open at two opposite points of the round cars, everyone gets a chance to feel the air changing from a blow-drier to a cool air conditioned breeze. It’s a bit of work for some folks (like me) to equalize their ears all the way up and down, but well worth it for the spectacular view.

Atop the mountain, there’s a large station with a movie, restaurant, gift shop, etc., but we took a hike along the 1.5 mile Desert View Trail to explore and get more views of Palm Springs far below.  It was impossible not to be seduced by the sweet smelling mountain air, the songs of the birds, the towering trees, and the clear little stream that flows with chilly water.  The views were predictably amazing, showing Palm Springs as if it were just a big map at our feet.  We easily spotted the Palm Springs airport, the huge wind farms, golf courses, and all the major roads.

Brett and I spent a couple of hours atop the mountain and left only at sunset.  When the sun dipped behind the mountains to the west, we started feeling a bit cold. Not a problem, because 10 minutes after boarding the tram car we were once again in the oven of the valley.

Next stop was dinner, and we decided it would best be found by walking five blocks of downtown.  This gave us the opportunity to explore at a slow pace.  The big find of the day is pictured at left.  Like Hollywood, Palm Springs has a walk of famous residents, along Palm Canyon Drive.  Here I am with Adam West’s star.  You may know him as Batman from the campy old TV series, which I grew up watching.  Somehow this particular star struck me when all of the others didn’t, so we captured the classic tourist shot. I hardly ever do stuff like this.

Next stop on the roadtrip: Phoenix area.  We’ve packed up and are heading out again …

OK, fun’s over.  No more playing around on mountains.  We are on the trail of business now. Brett and I have taken the little Honda Fit out to cruise the highways in search of new ventures.  It’s a roadtrip!

Our route on this trip starts with a run up I-17 to northern Arizona, in the Coconino National Forest, not far from Flagstaff.   This is an ideal place to go in the summer, because the 7,000 foot elevation means cool nights and comfortable days among towering Ponderosa pine trees.  We snagged a pair of rustic-looking cabins for our night here, thanks to our business hosts.

I set up mine as the temporary World Headquarters of Airstream Life, as usual. Normally I am setting up in the Airstream, but I appreciated the interesting change to a motel-style table beside open windows to the pine forest. It made for a great working environment. Unlike the northeastern rustic locations I have known, there were few bugs and nothing biting, which was nice since the cabin needed a little airing out when I arrived.  I just opened the front door and the back windows, and tapped away on my keyboard while the sweet smell of evergreen trees flowed through.

For whatever reason, I woke up at midnight feeling like I would never need to sleep again.  The fan was running and the windows were open to the night breeze, the forest was quiet, and the air was comfortably dry.  There was enough moonlight to let a shaft of silver light in the window. I lay there and considered what a nice night it was, and how if I had any sense I’d be sleeping through it.  That didn’t seem likely, so I conceded that it was also a nice night to catch up on a few emails and read one of the books I’d brought.

A few hours later I did finally manage to get back to sleep, until it was time to regroup at 7:30 a.m. for the morning’s business meetings.  In a setting like this, almost any business is fun.  We sat in the lodge’s restaurant and chatted with the General Manager, then toured the entire facility before packing up for our next stop.  A long roadtrip lay ahead: 375 miles to Palm Springs, CA, all the way from our 7,000 foot perch in the piney mountains down to sea level in Palm Springs.

Talk about a change of environment — our route took us to Flagstaff, then west along I-40 (which is Route 66 territory), and down Rt 95 and 62 into the desert to I-10 and finally Palm Springs.  Counting our start in Tucson, we traveled through a wide range of ecosystems, from the Saguaro cactus of the low Sonoran, to the Ponderosa pine of the Coconino National Forest above the famous Mogollon Rim, through high desert along I-40 in northern AZ, and then down below sea level in California’s Mojave.  This is why roadtrips can be much more fun than flying.  If we’d flown we would have seen a lot of airport departure gates and look-alike food courts, but we saw the country instead.

Of course there’s still the curse of road food.  Our first dinner of the trip was at an excellent steakhouse run by our hosts, where I had an amazingly good brisket (and Brett had a melt-in-your-mouth filet mignon). But then there was the rushed breakfast, the so-so burger in Kingman AZ, and the car snacks. By the time we got to Palm Springs we were looking for something light.

Palm Springs in June is a fairly quiet place.   Temperatures of 109 to 113 (this week) will do that.  We’ve been told the hotels will fill up on the weekends with Los Angelenos looking for an escape from the “June gloom,” but on Monday night we had the downtown to ourselves.  We wandered past a fairly swanky restaurant on Palm Canyon Drive, the type of place where the waiter puts the cloth napkin on your lap for you (as if I had somehow lost the ability to do it myself), and we were the only customers at 7 p.m.

Being not particularly hungry, we ordered from the salad menu only.  I ordered a “salmon salad” and Brett ordered a Caesar salad with chicken, about $9 each.  With four staff members in the front of the house, we felt a bit conspicuous ordering only salads (the profit would not even cover the cost of running the outdoor air misters while we were there), so Brett tacked on a glass of wine for himself.  That glass cost almost as much as the meal, so maybe he overcompensated a little.

My salad turned out to be a fine green salad with homemade dressing plus a large slab of perfectly cooked salmon covering the entire thing.  It was a rather substantial meal despite my intention to have a small one. I can only imagine what I might have gotten if I had seriously regarded this as the prelude to a entree.

Dessert, a single scoop waffle cone with “coconut Macadamia caramel” ice cream, purchased a few blocks down the street, was $5.  The ice cream was excellent but I was reminded of the line from Pulp Fiction about the five dollar milkshake.  I’ll remember that for a while.  It’s not the big miles but rather the little details that make a roadtrip memorable.