Palm Springs · 10–24 April 2027
Two weeks in the desert, and the valley is running three festival weekends while we are in it. Everything here is within two hours of Palm Springs: a cable car to 8,516 ft, a national park, a painted mountain, and a lot of time doing nothing by a pool. None of it is booked.
A pile of things that looked good, not a plan. Nothing is booked and nothing is decided. Some of it we might do together, some in pairs, some not at all. Fourteen nights is long enough that nobody has to be anywhere.
Prices are per person unless a card says otherwise, and they are roughly what to expect rather than a quote.
A cable car, a balloon and a warbird, all before the heat.
Ten minutes from 2,643 ft to 8,516 ft, up Chino Canyon. The floor of the car rotates twice on the way, so nobody has to fight for a window. At the top there is pine forest, fifty miles of trail, and often snow in April.
They fly at first light because that is the only part of the day the valley air is still. The season runs November to April or May, so the fortnight sits at the end of it.
The Air Museum keeps most of its collection flying rather than roped off, and sells seats. The bottom of the range is a WWII transport, the top is a T-33 jet. The hangars on their own are worth the entry.
Everything here is within two hours of the front door.
An hour from the house, and the one thing out here that everybody agrees on. Two deserts meet inside the park, which is why the Joshua trees stop halfway across it. No timed entry, so the day can start whenever it starts.
Palm Canyon holds the largest California fan palm oasis in the world, and it starts fifteen minutes from downtown. Andreas Canyon is an easy mile loop; Murray is four miles and about 600 ft of climb.
The fault runs along the north side of the valley, and the tour goes into a private preserve on top of it. The interesting part is the palm oases: the fault crushes rock finely enough to push groundwater to the surface in a place with no water.
An accident from 1905 that never drained, now saltier than the Pacific and shrinking. Bombay Beach is a few hundred people living on the shoreline of it, and has turned itself into an outdoor art site. Not a swimming lake.
Leonard Knight spent about thirty years painting a hill outside Niland with adobe, straw and half a million litres of donated paint. He finished around 2011 and died in 2014. Slab City, an off-grid settlement on an abandoned marine base, is just past it.
Half zoo and half botanical garden, in Palm Desert, and the animals are the ones that actually live in deserts. April is the end of the good season for it, because the whole place shortens its hours once the heat arrives.
The thing the town is actually known for, and mostly free to look at.
The Annenberg estate in Rancho Mirage, where eight presidents were entertained and a fair amount of foreign policy got discussed by a pool. The nine-acre garden and the visitor centre cost nothing and need no booking. The house is the part that sells out.
Six architects built most of what the town is known for between about 1945 and 1970. Nearly all of it is private and lived in, so this is a drive and a look over walls rather than a visit. The visitor centre is itself a 1965 Albert Frey petrol station.
A family cactus garden on South Palm Canyon since 1938, on one acre, with a greenhouse they call the Cactarium. Small, cheap, and about a hundred years older in feel than everything around it.
The high desert collects people who build strange things.
A domed wooden building in Landers, put up by a man who said the design came from Venusians and was meant to reverse ageing. It does neither, but the acoustics are genuinely unusual: you lie on a mat while someone plays twenty-two quartz bowls.
A film set built in 1946 as a working western town, which people then moved into and never left. Mane Street is still there. Pappy & Harriet’s at the end of it is a barbecue place that books bands well above its size.
A 45 ft brontosaurus and a 65 ft tyrannosaurus beside the I-10, built by a man who ran the diner next door and wanted people to stop. They did. Twenty minutes from town, and right next to the outlet mall if anyone wants that too.
No ticket, no booking.
Several thousand turbines standing in the gap between two 10,000 ft mountains, which is what makes the pass windy enough to be worth it. In April the ground between them is often yellow with brittlebush.
Palm Canyon Drive closes to traffic every Thursday evening and fills with stalls, food and buskers. Two of them fall inside the fortnight, on 15 and 22 April. It is the one reliable evening where the town is out on the street.
Only relevant for whatever we actually feel like doing. Roughly in the order things stop being available.
Prices and opening hours here were checked in September 2026 and none of it is booked. Worth confirming before anyone plans a day around it, particularly on the festival weekends, when roads on the east side of the valley close and journey times stop meaning anything.