Road Trip

HolyCoast is going on the road for a few days.  My wife has a conference today and half of tomorrow at the Rancho Las Palmas Resort in Rancho Mirage, a suburb of Palm Springs.  We'll be leaving out early for the 111 mile drive to the desert.

While she's conferencing today I'm going to do something I haven't done since I was 18 - ride the 2 1/2 mile Palm Springs Aerial Tramway up to the top of the 8,500' mountain.  The last time I did this was in April of 1974 during a family Easter vacation to Palm Springs.  In fact, when going through some old slides my dad had taken I found some photos from that trip.  Here's a rather poorly lit photo of myself and my dad at the top of the hill.

And another poorly lit photo of my sister, mom and myself as we walked around the forest area on top of the mountain.  There was still a little bit of snow up there, and what was funny was watching the tourists who boarded the tram at the bottom on a very hot day only to get off at the top in 35 degree weather with no jackets or coats.  We were prepared.

They have some new fancy rotating tram cars now and I'm looking forward to the trip.  My wife hates this kind of stuff so she won't be missing anything.  I'll post some photos of the trip up and the top of the mountain.

Once she finished up on Friday afternoon the second phase of the trip will start - a 552 mile drive to Northern California so we can spend the weekend with my daughter.  She has a couple of concerts we want to see, and we'll be doing some things we enjoy doing when we're with her, including going to see the newest Harry Potter movie which opens this weekend.

We'll be going from 83 and sunny in Palm Springs to 58 and rain in Rohnert Park, but that's okay.  We'll be getting the weather we expect from both locations.

And away we go!