Our trip into the Greater Palm Springs area started off with some frustration. The drive back into central California from the Greater San Diego area was uneventful and the weather was great.

We arrived early afternoon at Outdoor Resorts in Cathedral City, just like we planned. This is a Resort that all the sites are privately owned and some of them are rented out. All intertwined around an 18 hole golf course. The golf course being one of over 140 courses in the Coachella Valley. We booked our site at the end of October and as always we make sure the resort knows what we are coming in with, our motorhome and trailer. We also make sure that the trailer can either be on our site or close by as we use it as a storage locker. We were told this is not a problem and the site was booked and down payment paid. Sorry, I regress! So, we arrived early afternoon and checked in. We paid our “resort fee” and got our picture taken for our photo id cards which was a first for us. This is when it got frustrating. The front desk phone rang and our check in lady answered it. The person on the other line, sitting in the office a few meters away told her that we could not park our trailer on site. They just said we need to find a spot to store our trailer, no help, nothing! We were not impressed. We called the rental office we booked with which is onsite but apparently not affiliated with the resort. They made calls and then got back to us and said sorry they made a mistake. Our trailer was not allowed but they would give us a credit to cover the cost of storage and the hassle. This would have been fine but the only storage she could find was one that we would have to leave the trailer outside of the secure lot due to parking it with our motorhome.

Well, while we were waiting for her to sort storage options out we called other resorts and finally on the fourth one they had room. To end this long story, we got our money back from Outdoor Resorts and headed over to Indian Wells RV Resort. After two hours at Outdoor we pulled into our site at Indian Wells and got set up at 17:00 as the sun was setting. It is an older park but the people are nice and the location is great. Also, our trailer is still hooked on behind us.

When we woke up in the morning we were in a better frame of mind. We reorganized our plans for our visit in the valley and instead of ten days, we are staying six and heading to Vegas early. Now it was time to explore Indio, Indian Wells and Palm Desert. This was a nice 40 km cycle and we got a feel for the palm tree lined streets surrounded by some snow covered mountains.

Over the next two days we covered the same area and found our way up into the Santa Rosa Mountains. Well, at least up the mountain until the bike lane disappeared and we found ourselves cycling on the curvy road without a shoulder, very dangerous! With California drivers not being some of the better ones we have seen ( sorry John and Suzzane!), we decided to use this as our turn around and headed down the four hundred meter climb we had just done. It is a lot faster going down then up! At the bottom of the hill is the “new money section” street called, El Paseo, lots of very expensive stores! One of the ones we went into was the Tesla store where we drooled over two of their cars in the showroom.

Speaking of cars and high end stores. The first day when we cycled to our neighbourhood grocery store, in the fifteen minutes that it took Larry to get our groceries, June counted 4 Bentley convertibles in the parking lot. That is over a million dollars worth of cars! It is a different world. It seems around here the Mercedes and BMWs are the middle class cars. Once, stopped at a traffic light, an even more impressive Rolls Royce convertible pulled up beside us at our stop light, and WOW it was gorgeous!! We googled the price when we got home: $360,000

Another cycle that we did took us just 7 kms down our road to the clubhouse of the PGA West golf courses and villages. With the PGA coming next weekend it looked like a lot of set up was going on. Since we could not cycle through any of the gated villages, and the courses are private we continued on and ended up at Lake Cahuilla Recreation Area. There is an RV park nestled along the lake and one area that has horse paddocks, if you want to come with your four legged friends. It was quite scenic nestled up against the Santa Rosa Mountains.

The week went by pretty fast. We had some nice cycling and great weather but unfortunately with all those golf courses we did not even play one round. Maybe next time!