The honor of receiving the very first star on Palm Springs Walk of Stars in 1992 didn’t go to a blockbuster entertainer like Bob Hope, Ginger Rogers or Frank Sinatra. The coveted star was instead bestowed upon a modest and well-liked man from Indiana, Earle Clifford Strebe, in front of the historic Plaza Theatre he…
You may be familiar with the large marble Chinese Guardian Lion statues between Route 66 and Kelbaker Road but did you know Amboy may have once had its very own living African lion? “Old Man Miller,” as he was known in the Amboy area, was the first person to spot a large African lion near…
Have you ever wondered if the vastly different cities of Big Bear City and La Quinta, California, could possibly have anything in common? One is high in the San Bernardino mountains , a few minutes from Big Bear Lake, and the other is near the Santa Rosa mountains in the low desert, approximately an hour’s…
Your knight called and said you really ought to be here. Shields Dates, located at 80-225 Highway 111 in Indio, just over the border of La Quinta, is a favorite stop for world-class travelers and locals alike. The company was founded in 1924 by Floyd Shields and his wife, Bess Lugton. Floyd Shields was one…
Happy Traveler is an 130-site RV park with tight quarters. It offers full hookups, 30-50 amp service, pool, seasonal activities, shuffleboard and a laundry room. The park does not accept RV’s over 40 feet long. Tall hedges separate each site. We’ve camped here twice but hesitated to write about it because we actually don’t have…
Keeping an eye on our local booming house prices in our sleepy southern California desert town spearheaded us in the right direction…
One of our hobbies we enjoy is browsing museum gift shops and used bookstores for nuggets of information in the form of small books and pamphlets. Some are out-of-print so discovering these treasures is extra fun. As you can imagine, we have collected quite a few desert-related books over the years. If anything good can…
Victorville and Route 66: 7th Street meets D Street, and the year 2018 meets the roaring ’50s. The Hotel Stewart was originally the Turner Hotel more than a hundred years ago, and was serving full-course dinners for 35 cents back in 1936. Decades make a difference, and along with fires and demolitions crews, time has…
It is a given that when researching information about a particular topic, one discovery often leads to another. Such is the case when we recently wrote about the T Cross K Ranch in Mission Creek Preserve, just down the road from Desert Hot Springs, California. Cabot Yerxa’s name kept popping up in old newspapers. An…
There once was a time at least 2,000 years ago, when the only voices heard in the desert below San Jacinto were those of the Cahuilla people. At a time when the Roman Empire ruled over most of Europe and the Middle East, the Cahuillas lived here in relative peace. The Romans are gone, of…