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Palm Springs | BCBusiness
Escape to a place that gets sun more than 350 days a year. Don’t mistake Palm Springs for a hedonistic desert sojourn. That trip is four hours east, in Vegas. Palm Springs is where you go in January when your vitamin C and D levels have crashed. Like the European aristocracy that once flocked to the healing waters of Bath, West Coast celebrities and dealmakers go to the Coachella Valley in winter for the dry heat and seclusion. And to get in shape for the red-carpet season.
Don’t mistake Palm Springs for a hedonistic desert sojourn. That trip is four hours east, in Vegas. Palm Springs is where you go in January when your vitamin C and D levels have crashed. Like the European aristocracy that once flocked to the healing waters of Bath, West Coast celebrities and dealmakers go to the Coachella Valley in winter for the dry heat and seclusion. And to get in shape for the red-carpet season.
Beneath the glassy surface of chain restaurants and outlet shopping, you wouldn’t immediately peg Palm Springs as a forager’s paradise. Trees brim with all manner of unpicked grapefruit, date, avocado, lime and Meyer lemons, which dangle over the gates of swank desert-modern compounds and golf resorts, sweet enough to eat like oranges.
Best Bed When people say they’re going to Palm Springs, they really mean the Coachella Valley, which is comprised of nine connected cities of which Palm Springs is at the heart. With 11 tennis courts, five spas and three pools, the recently remodelled Palm Springs Tennis Club Resort is in the heart of the heart. When choosing your poolside bungalow, remember that one of the pools is specifically family friendly. (palmspringstennisclub.net)
Best Meal Look for rundown steak houses, desert-modern diners and Mexican joints that do half-price margarita nights. Try the combo plates at family-friendly Pueblo Viejo Grill. Remember that the corn tamales trump the chile rellenos. (puebloviejogrill.com)
Can’t miss For two weeks in April, the world’s biggest music festival takes place in Indio. (coachella.com)
Likewise, you don’t expect to find more than 4,000 wind turbines between the San Jacinto and San Gorgonio mountains that evoke the same limbs-splayed-to-the-heavens awe that you’d find in the nearby and very epic Joshua Tree National Park. A two-hour tour, run by “the longest continuously operating windmill tour business in the world,” leaves daily at 9 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. – leaving you more then enough time to do the daily triathlon of sports performed by stroke: swimming, tennis, golf.
With more than 125 courses and 2,250 holes, there is no denser concentration of golf in the world. For as little as 15 bucks, you can walk onto one of the two Taquitz Creek championship courses – that includes range balls and drinks while you wait. It’s conceivable you could play courses designed by Nicklaus, Palmer and Norman over the span of a single weekend. The latter sprawls over a prehistoric ocean bed 40 feet below sea level. Bleacher Report anointed the former, which hosts the Humana Challenge (a.k.a. Bob Hope Classic), as the easiest course on the PGA Tour in 2012.
Ease is an important filter in your desert triathlon. If you have a family and a sense of nostalgia, you can spend your entire holiday at the recently remodelled Palm Springs Tennis Club Resort. If you prefer watching to playing, The BNP Paribas Open – arguably the world’s most significant tennis tournament after the Grand Slams – goes March 4 to 17 in nearby Indian Wells. If you neither play nor watch, you can simply stroll the historic Tennis Club District, absorbing mid-century modern architecture – and some of the swankiest places in California to swim lengths as the sun dips below the bowl rim of mountains that surround the valley.
Woody Guthrie probably wasn’t referring to the Ace Hotel & Swim Club when he pledged to trade his life to rest his heavy head on a bed of California stars. The Ace is more about lounging by the pool and drawing that night out.
Of course if you’re leaving B.C. for Palm Springs in the middle of winter, you might also want to wake up in a place where you can walk barefoot out over the rough onto some manner of ninth hole as dawn breaks and the egrets sit in a water hazard, in which case your best bet is a vacation rental snagged on a VRBO.com or Airbnb.com search. Add “golf” to the filter. You can also add “pool” and “tennis” and “mid-century modern,” and slide the maximum price arrow into the Sinatra end of things. Maybe you’ll find something with a lemon tree. The promise of another day’s triathlon will beckon with the first rays, the darkness of winter so far away.