OUR FAMILY HOLIDAYS
0247 Californian Holiday – Los Angeles & Palm Springs
Although, by 1980, I had already been to the US, Pat and the family hadn’t – and, in those days, the US was the most desired holiday destination. At the time I had just been given a company car, a Cortina Estate and, as a result, I had been able to sell my previous Renault. I got something like £5,000 for this, and had put this in the bank for a rainy a day.
Unfortunately, Pat decided she wanted to spend it on the holiday of a lifetime in the US. We then entered on to a number of months of arguing which nearly destroyed our marriage. Eventually Pat dug in her heels in so hard that I had to concede, but the marriage did not recover from those stresses for something like five years. This high price took the form of a holiday which was in fact a month in California. It was a two-week tour of the West Coast followed by two weeks in Los Angeles itself.
It was very long flight across to the West Coast, 12 hours as usual, and the children were very tired. We eventually ended up in a rather run down hotel in not very good part of Los Angeles, backing onto the Mexican part of the city. Even so we were grateful to be able to lie down and get some sleep. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we got to sleep, Sarah was banging on the door to say that Miles had injured himself. I never did find out what happened. It seemed that he tried climb up the window and fell, banging his head. So, in the early hours of the morning, we had to rush to the nearest hospital where the cut on his head was stitched -- at the cost of $150. This was our first experience of the US health services, and was not the best start for a holiday of our lifetime!
We had two days in Los Angeles getting acclimatised. We did the usual tour of Hollywood and down Sunset Strip.
Graumans Chinese Theatre
Of course we did Disneyland, the best part of Los Angeles.
The parade at Disneyland
From there, though, we launched out to Palm Springs just near the border with Arizona. I can only remember that it was fairly long drive to do in one day -- but I later made the same drive in a taxi, at over 100 miles per hour, in just an hour and a half. At that time we stopped off at the many tour stops: places where everything inside is tat - or, in this case - made from dates! I guess the couriers get their kickbacks there. But the result was that we didn't arrive at Palm Springs until the early evening, just in time for our meal
The tour wasn't
helped by the fact that the couri
er,
during a local shortage in California, had been flown by Cosmos across from
Greece. She had not the vaguest idea of what California was about, and spent a
lot of the time telling us about how retsina was made by the Greeks. I later
complained and received a substantial amount of money back from Cosmos. It
always pays to complain!
Our ‘Greyhound’ coach
Palm Springs was not then my favourite place, but when I later stayed there I did find it very enjoyable place. But - on the tour - we arrived on an the evening when the universities had their spring break and the place was full of university students causing an uproar everywhere you looked. In any case we only stopped off overnight, and started out again the following morning; so we saw less than nothing of Palm Springs itself.
The next day was taken up by a drive through the desert to Phoenix. At first everyone clambered to the windows to take photographs of the desert. It was not until later that we realised that America was so vast that - on the tour - almost everything lasted three days. Thus, in this case, it was three days before we came out of the desert. At first, though, we were keen to rush to take any pictures, but even the Joshua trees and the giant barrel cacti lasted for three days; and ultimately became boring!
Phoenix, when we arrived there, was pretty much of a nonentity. We actually went up to Scottsdale for the hotel. This, for once, was a very nice -- almost luxurious -- hotel. It had a whole series of swimming pools and was very comfortable. It also had lots of cacti around the grounds. My father later, doing the tour the reverse way round, managed to get a cactus spine in his foot!
hits