Palm Springs Nostalgia: An ‘80s Road Trip (Oldsmobile Edition)

AKA how my love of travel was born.

If you’ve ever daydreamed about sunburned noses, neon motel signs, and the hum of an overworked window AC while you cannonball to a radio you’re not allowed to touch, welcome in.

This is my sweet, slightly sarcastic reflection to an 80's Palm Springs roadtrip—specifically the version you reach in an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with a sister who hogs the armrest and parents who still swear 70s folk is the only acceptable “real music.”

Palm Springs, sunshine, chlorine, Virginia Slims, Hawaiian Tropic, neon

By the time we hit the windmills on Friday afternoon, the desert looked like someone had spilled a box of toothpicks across the sand and dared them to pirouette. I was sprawled in the back seat of our old Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme like a conquered He-Man villain—Skeletor in a seat belt—armed with a sweating can of Orange Slice and a head full of television jingles. My sister and I had drawn the invisible Maginot line down the cracked vinyl so neither of us could cross, not even a pinky toe. Mom called the line “a teaching tool.” I suspected it was a test devised by Inspector Gadget or at least by some kid psychology department where they also manufactured Cabbage Patch birth certificates and Atari cartridges that never loaded on the first try.

Dad had the radio tuned—of course—not to pop but to the folksy backwater of the dial, where guitar strings sounded like porch swings and every singer had a friend named Wind. It was a rolling mixtape of the 70s: Joni making clouds into metaphors, Cat Stevens promising morning would break, Jim Croce warning us not to tug on Superman’s cape, Gordon Lightfoot narrating maritime tragedy like bedtime stories. They called it “real music,” which was parental code for “don’t even think about Men at Work.” Naturally, as soon as Cat finished philosophizing, my sister and I launched into “Down Under” and “Thriller” in defiance, harmonizing like Fraggle Rock understudies on their lunch break. Dad said we didn’t have to sing. We kept singing, because in our family passive resistance was a tradition, like sunscreen and complaining about sunscreen.

The plan—beautiful in its suburban simplicity—was a Friday-to-Sunday escape: drive to Palm Springs, swim until our skin wrinkled like prunes, eat a hamburger the size of Endor, and fall asleep to air conditioning that hummed like a friendly spaceship. By spaceship, I obviously mean E.T.’s complicated nightlight. Return of the Jedi had just taught us that teddy bears could overthrow empires, so I had great expectations for the pool noodles at the motel. Meanwhile, the Cutlass’s ashtray was brimming with quarters, because Dad had promised we’d “maybe” find some games. He said he used to be “pretty good” at Donkey Kong, which was the same voice he used when he talked about high school football and a pair of bell-bottoms he swore were “tasteful.”

Halfway through the pass, Mom unveiled a surprise: a compact disc. A compact disc! Smooth, futuristic, with rainbow sheen—like The Dark Crystal, if it came from Circuit City instead of a haunted swamp. Mom said it never wore out, which sounded like witchcraft and made me think of A Christmas Story, when Ralphie discovers Ovaltine is an advertisement. “Never wears out” seemed like code for “you’ll scratch it by dinnertime.” Also, we didn’t own a CD player. This was beside the point. The future was here, carefully encased in a jewel box, making us all feel like the Jetsons had parked a saucer next to the Cutlass Supreme. Dad inspected it like a suspicious new neighbor and muttered something about “warm analog sound” before putting Jim Croce back on. The CD glinted in the back seat like a forbidden disco ball at a hootenanny.

We rolled into Palm Springs under a sky so bleached it looked like someone had left it in a bucket of Flashdance sweat. The motel sign promised “POOL • COLOR TV • GAME ROOM” as if black-and-white sets still roamed the earth like mammoths. The lobby smelled of chlorine and ambition. A faded poster announced “Karaoke Friday,” which might as well have said “Tonight: brave local dads attempt ‘Mr. Roboto.’” I loved it already; Dad, who considered anything post–James Taylor “newfangled,” looked like he’d just seen a synthesizer commit a felony.

Our room had two beds with spreads that looked like they’d been designed by Tootsie’s costume department—loud, floral, determined. The window AC clicked on with the gravity of a Wimbledon umpire: play. My sister launched into a bed like McEnroe arguing with a line judge, and I claimed the remote, which felt like being handed the launch codes from WarGames. Channel surfing was a contact sport: Webster, then Mama’s Family, then the A-Team exploding something absolutely necessary. I wanted Magnum P.I., obviously, because justice wears a mustache, but Mom called for the pool before we glued our retinas to the screen.

The pool was every good decision I had not yet made. Turquoise, a defiant black stripe on the bottom, and that 80s motel smell—chlorine, coconut oil, and the whispered promise of late checkout. Kids whapped each other with floaties like Ewoks testing new weapons. A radio by the fence played “Down Under,” which we all sang while not knowing any of the words after “vegemite sandwich.” Thriller had been out long enough that every kid with a pulse had perfected two and a half Michael Jackson moves and a deeply unsettling zombie face. If you cannonballed right when the chorus hit, the splash counted as choreography. Dad arrived with the resigned look of a man about to be waterboarded by Top 40; ten minutes later he was tapping a toe like a folk purist accidentally enjoying a drum machine.

On a towel, a girl named Shari (with a heart over the “i,” obviously) introduced She-Ra to her Barbie society. I respected any woman with a sword and excellent boots. Shari’s mom said she’d waited in line for four hours for a Cabbage Patch doll, and I tried to imagine anything worth four hours besides Disneyland or watching Mom try to open childproof Tylenol. Dad showed up in a T-shirt that said “I Survived the MAS*H Finale,” which was like wearing a medal for emotional bravery. He cannonballed, too: the rare dad cannonball, impressive in its disregard for dignity or depth markings.

After sunset we cruised Palm Canyon Drive, where neon made everything glamorous, like even the ice cream had an agent. Then we wandered back to the motel to investigate the “GAME ROOM.” It was a dank little cave off the ice machine—low ceiling, humming soda machine, carpet patterned like a headache, and the permanent smell of grape Fanta and lost allowances. Older kids ruled it like warlords: sunburned, shoeless, speaking in high-score politics. The screen glow made them look mythic, or at least well-practiced at ignoring curfews.

We weren’t allowed to hang out in there—“too rowdy,” Mom said—which only made it throb with importance. My sister and I stood in the doorway with contraband quarters burning holes in our pockets while a teenager in a faded Thriller tee hammered Donkey Kong like he was auditioning for WarGames. Every few seconds the door sighed closed and we were left with our reflections in the wired glass, two exiles from the kingdom of Cool.

Dad took pity and steered us away with the diplomacy of a folk-music ambassador. “Come on,” he said, “there’s a perfectly good vending machine by the laundry.” We bought orange sodas and sipped them on the concrete, listening to the muffled arcade noises—8-bit triumphs and crushed hopes seeping under the door—like radio transmissions from a country we weren’t old enough to visit. It was better, somehow, not getting in: the mystery stayed intact, the glow stayed sacred, and our quarters covered a very competitive round of lobby pinball that Dad pretended not to be good at.

In the bar, grown-ups clustered around the TV arguing about Dallas as if oil, betrayal, and shoulder pads were matters of national security. Someone declared, “CDs are the future,” and someone else said, “So were laserdiscs,” and everyone nodded like explorers pretending they knew where the map ended. Dad, clinging to the campfire of the 70s, fed another quarter into the jukebox and summoned James Taylor to sing about Carolina while the bartender tried to convince him to give “Mr. Roboto” a chance. Back in our room, the squeaky sofa bed did little to soothe our radiant sunburns. Friday ended with the AC rattling and us swearing we could hear the windmills talking.

Saturday began with motel waffles and a debate about SPF that escalated into a constitutional crisis. We staked out the same two loungers like we were renewing a lease. The day unspooled in sun-dazed loops: swim, dry, snack, repeat. Towel forts. Plastic cups sweating. A kid with a snorkel insisting he’d discovered Atlantis in the deep end. At some point a transistor radio coughed up Wimbledon—McEnroe barking at the universe, Navratilova serving entire philosophies. Adults debated line calls with the confidence of Supreme Court nominees. I decided grown-ups were strange: they lived for things on schedules, finales and championships and season premieres. Kids lived for things that didn’t announce themselves. You only knew they were happening because you were laughing in the middle of them.

Sunday morning came early, with the kind of quiet you only get after a lot of loud. We squeezed in one last swim—cooler water, fewer kids, the pool a mirror with bugs doing their best Esther Williams impressions. We floated on our backs and watched the sky bleach itself another shade of too bright. Check-out was announced with the ceremonial slamming of the trunk. The Cutlass groaned, we buckled, and the windmills waved hello and goodbye in the same gesture.

The drive home had fewer words and better snacks. Casey Kasem counted down a song that would be number one for exactly one week, which sounded tragic then and sensible now. Somewhere past the pass, my sister fell asleep with the Styx cassette in her lap. Mom traced circles on the lid of the CD case as if polishing the future could make it arrive faster. Dad, at peace with the road, found a station where Joan Baez sang like a lighthouse. We didn’t know it yet, but the Atari E.T. game would be buried in the desert like a secret only the jaded could love. We didn’t know that CDs would be replaced by things even shinier and less useful to hold. We didn’t know we’d grow up and measure summers by emails instead of freckles.

But we knew the important things: that pool water can turn you into a mermaid if you hold your breath long enough; that a dank game room is more beautiful when you’re not allowed inside. We had sun in our ears and chlorine in our hair and the kind of tired that means you did the weekend correctly.

And that, as He-Man would say, is most of the power. The rest lives somewhere between a motel towel that smells like coconuts, a scratched jewel case catching rainbow light, and a desert sky still bleached in memory—like it, too, once believed it would never wear out, preferably on acoustic guitar.