Palm Springs in 72 hours: a rotating tram, two-pool suites and a 26-foot Marilyn
Palm Springs keeps getting easier to reach, and a quick autumn long weekend is enough for its best hits. Travel writer Clint Henderson just spent three days in the Coachella Valley town and came back convinced it is more than pools and midcentury house tours.
The headline thrill is the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, a rotating tram car that climbs for about 10 minutes to Mountain Station at 8,516 feet. Adult tickets cost about $37 and kids ride for about $21, and time slots sell out, so book early. Up top there are sweeping views of the Coachella Valley and roughly 50 miles of hiking trails in San Jacinto State Park. Pack a sweatshirt: it is often more than 20 degrees cooler than the desert floor.
For culture, entry to the Palm Springs Art Museum is $25 and includes special exhibits — during his visit that meant "Queer Arcana," a show of LGBTQIA+ art. And there is the mandatory "Forever Marilyn" selfie, a 26-foot Seward Johnson statue modeled on "The Seven Year Itch."
Where to sleep and eat
He stayed at the Thompson Palm Springs by Hyatt, a 168-room midcentury-style resort on Palm Canyon Drive with two pools. Standard rooms can reach $887 a night, but award nights run 20,000 to 25,000 World of Hyatt points, with cash rates starting around $285. For a cheaper points bed, the all-suite Hyatt Palm Springs down the street starts at 8,000 points a night, while the Kimpton Rowan, in the city's tallest building, has rooftop views and rooms from about $169.
The food turned out to be the surprise. The hardest reservations in town are at Bar Cecil and its sibling Beaton's, both named for the artist Cecil Beaton. Inside the Thompson complex, Lola Rose serves eastern Mediterranean cooking — he is still thinking about the kabobs — and Bar Issi does coastal Italian. For Mexican, Tac/Quila's fajitas and Las Casuelas' California-style burrito both delivered.
"It's a small town with a big-city soul," said local Gene Howell, co-host of The Desert Brew on NBC Palm Springs. Henderson's own conclusion: he ran out of days before he ran out of restaurants, and he already plans to return.