Speakers Go To the Best Places -- Palm Springs Is An Oasis

Composed in Palm Springs, California--

Speakers get to go to all the best places because people always meet in beautiful resorts.  Recently, I was asked to speak in Palm Springs, California.

If Hawaii is paradise, then Palm Springs is an oasis.  The desert city is a great getaway for tourists from all over the world and it offers two unique types of self-guided tours:  one in the city and one in the mountains.

Palm Springs is associated with dead celebrities such as Dean Martin, Howard Hughes, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.  All had homes here.  Sonny Bono was the Mayor of Palm Springs before he won a congressional seat for California.  The downtown sidewalks feature celebrity stars such as Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller.

Visitors can buy a map to the stars' homes to take a self-guided tour of houses formerly owned by famous people.  Tons of homes are featured on the tour, including former homes of Sammy Davis Jr., Zsa Zsa Gabor, Alan Ladd, Kirk Douglas, Clark Gable and Bing Crosby.

Nearby, the city of Palm Desert features the famous Frank Sinatra compound, distinguished only by a pink brick wall that  encloses a five square block  plot of land.  I don't know what one has to do in order to have a  street named after himself, but Gerald Ford, Bob Hope and Dinah Shore have done it.

The main tourist attraction is a fantastic aerial tramway conceived by business man Francis Crocker.  A tramway car can transport up to 80 people to the top of San Jacinto (elevation 8,400 feet), where there is a restaurant and 54 miles of self-guided hiking trails. 

The tramway is the largest in the world and the only one of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

Crocker conceived the project in  1935, but didn't finish building it until 1963.  It's referred to as a "double-reversible" tramway because the floor rotates 360 degrees two times during the ten-minute ride.