Hotel news from SoCal’s new Joshua Tree AutoCamp, a Bay Area winery turned monarch butterfly sanctuary and the psychedelic side of Las Vegas

the Santa Barbara AutoCamp Glamping Company has developed a chain of luxury Airstream resorts in places like the Bay Area (Russian Sonoma River), Yosemite and Zion in the west, and Cape Cod and the Catskills on the east coast in recent years. Now the company – which embraces a sort of candle-boho sensibility – is opening its new location in the Southern California playground for cool kids: Joshua Tree.

The 25-acre property is expected to have a communal clubhouse that’s a “modern take on traditional Quonset huts,” a hot tub-plunge pool hybrid (plunge pool in warm months, hot tub in winter), and outdoor showers. in the most chic units. The sprawling trailer complex – once an oxymoron – says it will have 47 Airstreams and eight suites, each with custom textiles and “architecture that nods to the city’s eclectic nature.”

AutoCamp Joshua Tree was designed, according to its sleek marketing materials, for “minimal environmental impact” including native plantings, heavy reliance on solar energy, and starry sky compatible lighting. Among the resort’s offerings are experiences worthy of Southern California: sound healing sessions and wellness classes, wine tastings, and movies under the stars.

In recent years Joshua Tree has become a darling of the desert, the favorite getaway for a certain type of elegant angeno. To know, the kind who commands a brutalist two bedroom $ 1.75 million house set in a field of rocks. The downside to this explosion of interest among “creatives” – like a recent story from the Hollywood Reporter described them – is affordability. Property values ​​in the area have grown exponentially over the past five years, and Airbnbs is doing booming business.

AutoCamp joins the fun on December 16, with rates starting at a low of $ 175 on weekdays and breaking the $ 500 mark on busy weekends. Add in some disgusting resort fees (a whopping $ 53 here), and a weekend of “camping” could easily cost over $ 1,000. Toto, we are not at KOA more.

Las Vegas is (again) where the weird is

It’s been a strange few years. But there is something about Adele’s Residence in Vegas – and Katy Perry teases hers, Elvis Jumpsuit style – which alludes to normality. For those who are not familiar with Sin City’s strange habits, it’s easy to imagine it as another American industrial hub. What New York is to commerce, Washington DC is to government, and Los Angeles is to pop culture, Vegas – one is tempted to believe – is to mass entertainment.

Then Vegas turns out, again and again, to be so much weirder than elsewhere – so wacky it’s almost satire proof. It’s been 50 years since “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson appeared in Rolling Stone, and this desert metropolis just keeps getting stranger and stranger.

In recent developments, The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas has become even more, uh, colorful when Opium from Spiegelworld – a “wacky, scorching and wild journey” exploring “the space between Las Vegas and Uranus” – gave birth to a restaurant spin-off. The restaurant-encounter-hallucinogenic experience Superfrico open in September, but stunning reviews and photos of the self-proclaimed “psychedelic American-Italian-American” restaurant instantly provide a glimpse into this Alice-in-Wonderland culinary adventure.

Susan Stapleton Has The Trippy Visuals At Eater Las Vegas while The Points Guy offers some food details, which seems to be significantly less gonzo than the overall experience.

Meanwhile, El Cortez, one of the oldest casino hotels still in operation in Vegas, turned 80 this month, and Leezel Tanglao from The Points Guy walked into the Jackie Gaughan Suite at the Fremont Street Hotel. Named after the longtime El Cortez owner and famous Vegas character, who lived there until his death in 2014, this $ 1,000-per-night room is a time-traveling portal to the 1980s excess. Available by request only, the suite is 2,800 square feet of marble bidets, golden swan-shaped water faucets, and retro Vegas-style pink and gold.

While there is surely a to-do list for those who fantasize about what it would have been like to be a casino mogul during the Reagan years, it seems like a select few. The Gaughan suite only gets one reservation per month.

Bay Area Wine Estate attracts bees (and monarch butterflies)

Victory gardens of all kinds made a triumphant return at the start of the pandemic, when the weather was plentiful and food seemed to be running out of steam. In North Bay, the Jordan Estate of Sonoma County took its pandemic-era plantation in another direction, converting 10 acres of its prized Healdsburg real estate estate into a so-called “pollinator sanctuary.”

The cave, which also operates a European-style castle for overnight guests, seeded the preserved acres with native plants known to attract the western monarch and native bees, both of which are considered “at risk” in northern California. The multi-year project includes the planting of 3,400 plants covering 100 species, according to Marin Living Magazine. Among them: milkweed, the plant known to support migrating monarch populations.

“Milkweed is a very expensive – and difficult – plant to grow”, Lisa Mattson writes on the domain blog. “It takes a lot of work to successfully germinate milkweed. You can’t just throw the seeds in the ground and water them. The winery therefore teamed up with a local 4-H group to germinate milkweed plants. The estate is today the largest wine sanctuary in the country, according to the nonprofit eco-association Pollinator Partnership.

You do not have to stay at the Jordan Chateau, which is reserved for “Rewards members” of the cellar to experience the sanctuary. While tours are temporarily suspended for construction, the winery regularly hosts wine hikes and tours to show off the 1,200-acre property..