Tuesday Sep 5, 2023 - Palm Spring CA to Diaz Lake Campground

 

The Hideaway Motel was pretty fun. Sixties retro with a small pool, only 10 rooms, and mid- century modern furniture (aka 60’s stuff). They even had a record player and some LP’s (Peggy Lee, Edith Piaf, Sinatra, etc) to complete the travel back in time.

We made a reservation for the wind turbine museum for 11:00 which was 30 minutes away so we had time to walk into downtown Palm Springs and find a place for bagels and coffee.  Somehow they have 400 tiles on the sidewalks with famous people on them (think Hollywood Stars, sidewalk theme). Palm Springs is pretty upscale but it’s really sparkly clean. Stores with all the high end brands.

Then off to the wind turbine museum. A couple of road detours because of the hurricane a week or two ago. Lots of now dry mud in the roads, but we got there only 10 minutes late and we were the only ones there. So I spent my career in the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s in the wind energy business and it’s places like this that make me realize how old I am. They have a 15 minute movie and Tom, who ran the place, realized I was an old timer so he also set up the “old 5 minute movie” in the next room. Wow, blast from the past with names like Carter, Jacobs and Kennetek represented, long out of the commercial wind energy business, but important pioneers that did the hard startup stuff.

We did the drive through tour in the van and I got to see all of the old machines with no covers on, and engineers' delight. The biggest machines they had were modern 3.5 MW Vestas (Danish) machines. Man I’m old…

So next we filled with gas, $5/gal since California taxes the crap out of fuel, and then Google took us north toward our end destination, some where around Lone Pine. 

It is surprising how much desert we had to drive through today on primarily 2 laners but the weather was nice, the temperatures were not too crazy and as the day progressed, we climbed out of the desert and into the higher mountains with a bit of greenery. It is amazing that there are not many people in this corner of California after driving through the San Diego area and suburbs, but traffic was sparse up here.

We picked a small county campground just south of Lone Pine, Diaz Lake. We had no idea how full or big it is, but when we arrived it was mostly empty and only $14 a night with lots of sites right on the lake and mountains to the east and west. The sun was just setting as we parked so we got a nice end of the day light shot over the lake to the mountains east of us.

Soup and sandwiches for dinner and we spent some time organizing since we stopped for groceries today in Palm Springs (at Ralph’s), and we have not camped for a month or more.

Cozy tonight and ready to sleep in our very comfy van bed. And we hit Rt 395 this afternoon so we are on our way!!

Odometer = 16128