Not so great an experience.
We went to the tram in July, to see the views that everyone raves about. What we saw was the smog haze over the valley. It's much cooler up here however, so that was relaxing. We read the reviews before, and it seemed the cafeteria style restaurant was not so great, so we didn't go for the ride-and-dine option. We choose to eat at the "fancier" restaurant instead. It was a big costly mistake. It was 10 minutes to dinner menu, but they wouldn't give us the option of choosing from it even though there were more items on it for us to eat. We don't eat beef, pork or poultry, and we wanted to try the salmon dish. It took the waiter a long time to come out to us on the deck to give us water and the menu too. We ordered the trio antipasti, calafia chrimp calamari, and margherite penne with shrimp. Sounds pretty good, but: The red pepper hummus on the trio antipasti was dried a weird orange with a rather thick crust (meaning it's been sitting on the dish for a long time), the baguette tasted stale, the olives were black olives from a can, the best thing was the fresh tomato salsa. The penne had very thick old woody asparagus even though the grocers in palm springs were selling young asparagus. I had never seen such huge asparagus before. The grocers wouldn't even sell it. It was watery and tasteless except for the canned artichokes and the shrimp was boiled shrimp. The basil, vine-ripened dried tomato and garlic promised were non-existent in the dish. It looked like penne with some watery white liquid with yellow-green huge asparagus chunks with boiled shrimp on top. The Shrimp Calamari was cooked in OLD oil. Some of it came out looking like it had been cooked twice, like leftovers stuck to the fryer, or reheated leftovers. It was very brown, and extremely greasy without flavour. We never saw the waiter after serving our meal, even though our drinks needed refreshing. The cost of the meal was roughly $50. To make it worse, the Pines cafe ride-and-dine meal looked nicer, with corn on the cob and fresh green brocolli. The trails were badly marked, and it was hard to figure out where to go and which trail you were on. It was a nice stroll through the meadow section however. They didn't advertise well for some features of the building, such as the movie theatre, which we discovered as we explored the entire building. there is also wilderness hiking and an overnight camping area. It was playing a movie at the time. We spent a few hours up in the shade reading, and the cool breeze was very nice. However, the food left us with extremely bloated stomachs and uncomfortable, so going hiking went out of the day plan. It turned out to be food poisoning.
All in all, it was about $100 for 2 people to get up there. If we hadn't gotten the bad food, we might have enjoyed our stay up there much more.
So to travellers, if you Must go on the Tram, pack a picnic lunch and water, and don't eat at the restaurant.