April 22nd, Going UP?!?


We spent the last night at Carl and Cathy's villa timeshare (WOW! btw) and had a great relaxing time. We got up bright and early, really early...Sam was up around 7am every morning since he had Nannie and Grampy to play with...which meant that everyone (even sleepy mommy) was up early. We went to church (a great mass, relaxed with a funny priest, tailored for a resort town), had a bite to eat and hit the road for our first adventure...a tram.


The Palm Springs Tramway seemed like a cool thing to do...ride a car up the mountain, walk around a little at the top, enjoy the view and ride back down. So, the top is about 8400 ft high...ironically for a scientist numbers mean nothing for me...and then we drove up and couldn't see the top of the tram!

This was such a surreal experience, the following pictures will hopefully give you a feel for how cool this experience was...there's a lot of pictures, but if you're patient, you'll see some super cute Sam pics near the end of this post :-)
As we approached the tram, you couldn't see the infrastructure at the top (yup, we're in the US, so if visitor's wish for a greesy burger and fries at 8400 ft., their dreams can come true!)

Through the tram window on the way up...
And up...
And looking down...
And down...

Here we are (plus some stranger ending his hike...we should have noticed the fatigue that we were soon to experience!) starting the trek at the top of the mountain...when we left Palm Springs, it was about 70 F...at the top, it was about 40 F (that's about 22 C to about 7 C)...leave it to the Canadians to flock to the coolest parts of Southern California! Of course, the air was much thinner at 8400 ft., but we're tough...we can hike for an hour or two!

Here we are again (minus our friend)... Look at the scale of the forest here...in the middle of a desert (give or take a few thousand feet!)

I'm on top of the world! Almost literally :-)

The fresh mountain air knocked Sam into a great sleep!
The trees up here are huge! I just couldn't get over it!
A tree that smells of carmel? No joke!
Just beautiful!
A mommy sized tree and a baby sized tree...

My turn carrying Sam was over, so we gave Sam a chance to explore before being attached to Adam...
So much to look at!
Is this cone as big as my head???
Sam really liked these pine cones!
I'd love to study the geological history of this place! Look at this rock with little different rocks imbedded...

Every once in a while, we'd see a HUGE tree...this one fell across the trail and a cross-section was subsequently cut away.
A vibrantly blue bird...
Palm Springs, around 40 F hotter and 7000 ft lower...
Interesting rock and hole...
On the tram...

The tram we rode on the ride down San Jacinito Mountain...
Safe on solid ground!