A Trip By Aerial Tramway

See the little yellow car? It's coming for us!

Palm Springs is an odd place. It's in the middle of a desert and yet it's full of golf courses and rich people. It's also full of interesting mid-century architecture and fancy chocolate shops but that's not what we went there to see last Friday.

No, we went to see the Aerial Tramway. And now that I've experienced it, I can happily proclaim it to be the oddest thing in all of Palm Springs. It's basically a big tram car on a cable that whisks you up from the valley floor to 8,500 feet in just over 10 minutes. You stand up for the whole trip, facing big picture windows, watching the valley recede below you. Really, really far below you. It's a bit like watching out the window of an airplane, in fact. Oh, and did I mention that the floor of the tram rotates? Perhaps I should stop explaining and just show some photos. Keep in mind that it was nearly 80 degrees in the valley the day we visited.

Looking down towards the visitor center

When viewed down the mountain, everything looks very arid and hot. And far away.

Two feet of fresh snow!

But at the top it's another story! 54 miles of hiking trails, or so they said. We didn't hike nearly that far.

A three-legged dog. In sunglasses.

The altitude apparently makes people do strange things. This dog's human was giving a monologue about why the dog only liked to wear human sunglasses, not dog sunglasses.

There were also quite a few lovely snowmen, built by people who had apparently only heard of snowmen before but never seen one. The one on the left was one of my favorites. 

Here's one to prove I was really there. Look at all that snow!

And here's one to prove that Gabriel was there too.

And here is the end of our hike. You can tell it's the end, because that's the edge of the mountain. Look carefully... See Palm Springs way down there, in the distance? That's where we went next. And yes, I had a piece of super fancy chocolate before we headed back to LA. 

Crazy fancy key lime chocolate