Palm Springs

Palm Springs grew up as Hollywood's weekend retreat, and it has kept a weekend's priorities: eating well, and lying by a pool with a cocktail. The town is low and flat, a grid laid out at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains, which go straight up from the valley floor just west of downtown, and the light is the hot, dry light of the desert. The houses and hotels of its Hollywood years are flat-roofed and glass-walled, by architects such as Albert Frey and Richard Neutra, and many of them can be seen from the street in the Movie Colony and Vista Las Palmas, which saves knocking.

We went in October, driving out from LA, and October is when the season starts. Through to May the days run from the low 20s to the low 30s°C with almost no rain, and Modernism Week has a smaller October edition for anyone who came for the houses. December to February is the mildest by day and the busiest and dearest, with nights cold enough for a jacket. In July and August the highs regularly pass 40°C, and the pool stops being a choice.

We stayed in the Uptown Design District, a mile north of downtown on North Palm Canyon Drive, among the vintage furniture shops and design galleries, with Downtown a walk away to the south. For a first visit, or without a car, Downtown itself is the place: the walkable centre along the same drive, with the restaurants and cocktail bars on the doorstep.

Two days divide neatly, one by the pool and one in the desert. Joshua Tree National Park is about 45 minutes away, where the Mojave and the Colorado deserts come together, and the day there goes on a hike among the boulders and the Joshua trees. Then Pioneertown, four winding miles out of Yucca Valley, which Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and other Hollywood western stars put up in 1946: an 1880s Old West town to live in and film in, built because they were tired of travelling to work. Along Mane Street the false fronts hold real businesses, and The Cisco Kid was shot among them. It is a very strange place, which is the reason to go. Hollywood came out to the desert to stop working, and then built a town there to work in.

Back in town the evenings are for cocktails and eating well. We ate well, and the best of it was Vietnamese, at Rooster and the Pig, in a strip mall. The next morning, back to the pool.