On the Trail

Bob, Frank, Ike and Me



Street names in the Las Virgenes/Conejo areas run quite the gamut. There’s the enigmatic: Careful Avenue in rural Agoura and Teardrop Court in Newbury Park. We’ve got Roundup Circle in Thousand Oaks—which to the more horticulturally-inclined honors the famous weed killer rather than the neighborhood’s Old West-like setting.


Then there’s the lane called Chiquita in Old Town T.O., which in passing always makes me think of a chorus line of dancing bananas or my neighbor’s grizzled old dachshund which answers to the name.


Calabasas has its bird streets, Westlake Village gets nautical around its lake. Various Conejo Valley subdivisions are named for Ivy League universities, the stomping grounds of Robin Hood and his Band of Merry Men, flowers from Azalea to Zinnia, popular girls’ names from the ’50s and ’60s and every tree species this side of kingdom come.


Street namers in the Palm Springs area, where I recently vacationed, took a much simpler approach. Over a brainstorming breakfast they considered the local weather. A sunburned waitress with sun-streaked hair served them eggs sunnyside up. They peered out the diner’s window at the sun’s unbelievable glare on everything and anything, from a car’s windshield to the bell on a toddler’s tricycle to the bald pate of a golfer whose pale skin was reddening even as they watched him tee off. The street namers smiled and dictated a list to the secretary in attendance:


Sunny Lane. Sunny Dunes. Sunny Days. Sunny Terrace. Sunny Palms. Sunny Slope. Sunny Summit. Sunny View. So be it. Oh, and countless Sunrises, Sunsets and Sunshines. For good measure they included my two personal favorites—Sunswept Street and Suntan Lane. Pity the poor motorist who pulls off the road and has to ask directions in this sun-blasted, sunshine-besotted town.


A few miles from Palm Springs is the community of Rancho Mirage whose street namers were starstruck rather than sunstruck. To appreciate the choices, you need to hail from a certain generation and possess a particular political leaning.


While returning via bicycle from a visit to an acquaintance in an upscale mobile home community (that’s Rancho Mirage-speak for a tony trailer park) located on Gerald Ford Drive, I got a flat tire right in the driveway of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Medical Center. No emergency room offering flat fix-its was available, and I’d failed to pack a patch kit.


Out came my tattered map. I was stuck in the middle of Bob Hope Drive and my only hope (no pun intended) of getting back to my motel that night was to reach Frank Sinatra Drive’s intersection with Hwy. 111, the main artery, and catch a bus (the Sun Bus, naturally) with a bike rack.


My feet were badly blistered from my idiotic insistence the day before of walking around in a pair of white leather sandals I’d found at a local thrift shop. They were so sexy and frou-frou with gold charm bracelet ornaments dangling from the straps that they seemed designed to be worn specifically in a place like the old Palm Springs movie colony or the French Riviera. But I was barely ambulatory even in a merciful pair of old flip-flops, and Bob ran an awfully long way until he intersected Frank, and then Frank stretched for miles before he intersected the highway.


Since there was no one else afoot to offend, I shucked my shoes and walked with bare blistered feet on the grass, which grew pretty darn luxuriant for a desert town. The city’s gorgeously landscaped roadways feature silky-smooth sidewalks—undulating through acres of well-watered sod—that no one but a silly cycling tourist like me ever seems to use.


Resident dowagers drove by me looking quite agape, hermetically sealed inside their air-conditioned chauffeur-piloted Rolls Royces, while I pursued this atavistic activity called walking. The schlep afforded peeks inside the front gates of many manses, where some of the life-size statuary on display appeared to have been purloined from international museum collections or acquired at a defunct Greek restaurant’s fire sale. Big entryways were also popular, although even Lurch the Butler might stagger under the heft of a door wide enough to accommodate a full complement of high-kicking Rockettes.


Pushing the bike in record time, I barefooted it to catch the next-to-last bus back. Peering out across the highway I spotted a turn off for Thunder Road. Could it be…a street named after a great song by Bruce Springsteen, someone from my generation?


Gerald, Ike, Bob, Frank and The Boss? Rancho Mirage rocks!





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