Palm Springs

After a fairly leisurely start, we drove to Palm Springs - a fairly stress-free journey until the satnav decided to conk out on the Interstate, just shy, as it turned out, of our exit. We had to pull off, park in an Industrial Zone and reboot the car totally to get it going again. As a result, we got lost a bit and it took us somewhat longer than it should to find the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. It's a cable car that runs up a precipitous canyon of Mount San Jacinto and takes you from the desert below to the San Jacinto State Park above. It's nearly 9000 feet up and apparently thirty degrees cooler at the top, so it feels rather weirdly like a little bit of wilderness transported in from some cooler clime. Afterwards we found our hotel, the really rather fabulous Desert Riviera on East Palm Canyon Drive. It's a bit like the anti-29 Palms - especially given the rather laid back and hippyish vibe of the latter - slightly David-Lynchian in it's 50's Modernist perfection, with ten red-doored rooms arranged around a beautiful pool with cooling mist sprays, immaculate gardens and piped Vegas-lounge music (I swear that it was actually 'Blue Velvet' playing the first time I walked out of the door of Number 10 in search of complementary treats.) We went to Ralph's for supplies and got a huge takeaway pizza from Guiseppe's to scoff behind the safety of our blinds before we hit the pool...