Travels with Tucker

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Palm Springs International Film Festival

The Palm Springs International Film Festival is a big deal. Second-largest film festival in the US (after Sundance, I guess), they are showing over 180 films this year from dozens of countries. We have tickets to see three films, but it was really hard to choose from all they have. We saw The Broken Circle Breakdown last night, which is a Belgian film about a Belgian who plays American bluegrass music and his relationship with a woman and their daughter who gets cancer. It is a beautiful and engaging film that is Belgium's entry for the Oscars this year. I highly recommend it if it comes to the Plimoth this year. We will be going to see Nightingale (China) and The Forgotten Kingdom (South Africa) this week. It was especially fun that the director of the Belgian film was at the showing and stayed for questions after. We saw on the news that a ton of famous actors were here for the opening gala like Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Matthew McConnaughey, but they don't seem to be staying at the Happy Traveler or shopping at the same super market we frequent, but maybe we'll see them at Starbucks.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Hiking in the Indian Canyons of Palm Springs

The local Native American tribe is the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla Indians. Due to some unusually magnanimous dealings with the US government, these people came into some serious land holdings in the Palm Springs area. Based on some nineteenth century treaties and finalized only in 1959, the local tribe owns every other section of the land around Palm Springs (like a checkerboard):

They are the largest single landowner in Palm Springs and the tribe consists of about 300 individuals! They are a long way from the poor people on most reservations. The lands that you see to the left of the pink Palm Springs area on the map are mountains and canyons that the Indians let visitors enter and explore--for a fee (like they aren't already rich like a Romney). We spent an afternoon hiking the Palm Canyon area and it is really unique.

Palm Canyon is the largest fan palm oasis in the world. Water runs pretty much year-round through the canyon and the native California fan palms thrive. We hiked about four miles round trip and took lots of great pictures:

The land around the canyon is typical desert vegetation--cactus, cholla, palo verde, etc. Down in the canyon, the fan palms dominate. We also did some hiking on the ridge above the canyon for some terrific views.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Palm Springs

Happy New Year, everybody!

Well, it has been about three weeks since our last blog update and I apologize to all our fans and followers for that hiatus. Between the holidays and sloughing off the affects of two non-stop months and about 6,000 miles of travel, we have just been recharging our batteries. We have settled nicely into our little space at the Happy Traveler's RV Park along with about 200 other refugees of colder weather. We have explored some of Palm Springs on foot, on our bikes and driving and have found it to be a fabulous area to hang out. Great restaurants, a fine art museum, an internationally acclaimed film festival, beautiful mountains and canyons for hiking...oh, and great weather, too. We miss the Gulf beaches and of course our other Florida snowbird friends, but Palm Springs has a lot to offer our travel-weary bones. We'll put up a few more posts to catch up on some of our doings over the next day or so.