PALM SPRINGS - You don't have to be rich and famous to have a good time in Palm Springs anymore. All you need is a little imagination, a few dollars in your pocket and a whole lot of sun screen.

With 354 days of sunshine a year, palm trees everywhere you look, and your choice of more than 10,000 swimming pools, who could ask for anything more.

Although Palm Springs used to be a semi-exclusive haven for Hollywood movie stars back in the 1930s and '40s, it has evolved over the years into a unique desert playground accessible to just about everybody, with something for every size pocket book.

Although the city has more than 140 hotels and motels with almost 6,500 rooms, including some suites for as much as $500 a night, more than 100 of the hotels have fewer than 25 rooms and a correspondingly modest price tag.

The Villa Rosa Inn where we stayed had just six units artfully arranged around a gleaming blue swimming pool complete with soaring palm trees, bright red bougainvillea flowers and its own resident hummingbirds. Our room with a separate full kitchen and a complimentary continental breakfast every morning cost $119 a night.

If you shop around, you may be able to find a room for as little as $69 a night, but the intimacy of a place like the Villa Rosa Inn is well worth the extra bucks. Waking up every morning with the sun streaming through the front window blinds and the swimming pool shimmering just steps from our front door, it felt like our own little corner of paradise: breakfast under an umbrella on the patio, a copy of the morning newspaper left at our front door, palm trees swaying at one end of the pool and half a dozen hummingbirds flitting around a small fountain at the other end.

Talk about getting away from it all.

Like just about every place else in Palm Springs, the Villa Rosa Inn is less than a block from Palm Canyon Drive which runs through the city like the yellow brick road in “The Wizard of Oz." Nearly all of the hotels, motels, elegant stores and hundreds of restaurants are strung out on one side or the other of Palm Canyon Drive which continues eastward for 22 miles as Highway 111 through Palm Springs' eight little sister cities in the Coachella Valley - Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes, La Quinta, Thousand Palms and Indio.

The population of Palm Springs is about 45,000 and the combined population of the nine desert cities is about 250,000. “During the ‘snowbird’ season - from November to May - the total population doubles to 500,000”, she said.

“That's why we have so many wide streets in Palm Springs” said Jeannine Raymond, our host, “It's to handle all the extra traffic during the winter months.”

The valley as a whole has more than 300 hotels and motels, 30,000 swimming pools and nearly 100 golf courses, as well as 600 tennis courts and two polo clubs. More than 30 of the hotels cater exclusively to gays.

Although it was a little hard to tear ourselves away from our idyllic pool-side setting, I was surprised at how many other fun things there are to see and do in Palm Springs - well worth sacrificing a few hours of your precious pool time.

One of the town's most popular attractions is the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway which transports you from the hot desert floor to a cool alpine wilderness at the 8,516-foot level of Mount San Jacinto in about 10 minutes. The change in climate is breathtaking and the view of the valley below is spectacular. There is a cafeteria-style restaurant at the top, as well as a cocktail lounge, snack bar and gift shop. If you're feeling especially energetic there are also 54 miles of hiking and horse trails in a state park that fans out behind. Tickets for the tram ride are $21.65 for adults, $17.65 for seniors and $12.95 for children. For just $10 more, you can have dinner at the mountaintop restaurant as well.

The tramway has new gondolas which revolve 360 degrees during the trip up the mountain to provide a more spectacular view than ever.

Meanwhile back on the desert floor, one of the most fascinating places of all to me was the Moorten Botanical Garden with more than 3,000 varieties of cactus and an admission price of just $2.50 and $1 for kids. It was founded 60 years ago by Chester Moorten, a landscape designer who had been one of Mack Sennett's original Keystone Cops in the golden era of Hollywood's silent-movie days. Although Chester died some years ago, his wife Patricia and son have continued the family business and grandson Jason was the ticket-taker the day we visited.

Although I've never been a great cactus fancier, I was amazed at the hundreds of different types on view. It was like walking through a bizarre jungle where each prickly cactus looked exactly like the name it was given, including Barrel, Tennis Racket, Candelabra, Octopus, Grizzly Bear, Organ Pipe (10-feet-high) and one called Creeping Devil that slinked along the ground like a parade of fuzzy green snakes.

As an extra added attraction, the Moortens have imported a couple of dinosaur footprints from Utah and Texas as well as a 20-foot-long petrified log from Arizona. There is also a cage full of iguanas guaranteed to make any visitor go “ooh” or “ahh.”

The most outstanding of Palm Springs' many natural wonders, though, are the Indian Canyons, five miles south of town. The Andreas, Murray and Palm Canyons were where the Aqua Caliente Indians found refuge from the desert 3,000 years ago. The towering cliffs, waterfalls and lush vegetation enabled the Indians to develop a network of small villages where they thrived on more than 200 edible plants and 100 types of animal food.

In 1876, the U. S. government decided to split up the land around Palm Springs between the railroads and the Indians, who got 32,000 acres for a reservation - including 6,700 acres that lie within today's city limits. This has made the Indian band the largest single landholder in Palm Springs.

Today the Indians charge visitors $6 to enter the three canyons. (It's $4.50 for seniors and $2 for children.) Special jeep tours are also available at extra cost, as well as on horseback and via covered wagons. If you like, you can even fly over the canyons in a Dream Flight hot-air balloon while sipping a glass of bubbling champagne.

Palm Canyon, the longest of the three canyons at 15 miles, reportedly has more palm trees per square inch than any other place in the world. All three are ideal for hiking, horseback riding and picnicking.

The Aqua Caliente Indians also operate one of the oldest and most popular spas in downtown Palm Springs, which includes a 230-room hotel and gambling casino. Aqua Caliente is the Spanish word for “hot water” that refers to the hot springs over which the spa, hotel and casino have been built.

Right in the middle of downtown Palm Springs is the oldest house in the city, an adobe dwelling that was built for John McCallum, who became the town's first permanent white settler in 1884. McCallum was a San Francisco judge who moved his family to the desert seeking health for his tubercular son. Just two years later, the first Palm Springs hotel was built and the town has never looked back.

One of the most charming things about Palm Springs is the fact that much of its heritage has been preserved over the years so that you get an interesting mix of the old and the new throughout the downtown area, a sleek new boutique with the latest designer fashions cheek-by jowl with the 1940's cafe complete with a long narrow lunch counter, 20 stools, and six vinyl covered booths.

There are dozens of art galleries, high-fashion dress shops and intriguing novelty stores all up and down Palm Canyon Drive.

The best way to cap any winter visit to Palm Springs is to get yourself a couple of tickets to “The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies”, a razzle-dazzle, old-fashioned, vaudeville style revue in which all the dancers and singers are between 54 and 86 years of age.

This year's headliner is Anna Maria Albergette, but the real stars of the show are “The Long-Legged Lovelies”, 11 veteran showgirls from Las Vegas, Hollywood and New York, of whom the youngest is 55 and the oldest is 88. They can all still kick with the best of them, and Maryetta Evans, who started out in vaudeville more than 60 years ago, still stops the show every night when she does the splits at the age of 88.

“More than one million people have seen the Follies since we opened in the historic Plaza Theater here eight years ago,” said the show's founding producer and continuing emcee, Riff Merkovitz. A former TV producer, who was born in New York, but grew up in Toronto, Merkovitz is still one of the "babies" of the company at the age of 65.

One last tip: Although you can get a room for almost half-price at many hotels in July and August, a lot of other places simply close down altogether. With a daily temperature that often hits 110 degrees or more, it's just too darn hot, swimming pool or no swimming pool.

Other Attractions: Palm Springs Air Museum - see a collection of vintage warplanes from the Second World War: Knott's Soak City Water Park - try out 13 different water slides and California's largest wave pool; Palm Springs Windmills - tour a privately owned wind farm with 4,000 wind turbines that can produce enough electricity for the entire Coachella Valley: Eldorado Polo Club - enjoy a picnic while watching a professional polo match.

Information: Visit the Palm Springs Visitor Information Center,or write to 2781 North Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs, CA 92262; or call (800)777-4647. Or visit the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce Web Site.