Holiday to Indian Wells in Mar 2025: Day 4 – Hollywood to Dana Point

By Nige on March 8, 2025 at 8:48 pm
Type: Post
Story: Holiday to Indian Wells in Mar 2025 Category: Travel
Tags: Dana Point | Hertz | Hilton | Holidays | Hollywood

We were looking forward to visiting a new place today. Dana Point was on the Pacific Coast Highway, south of the famous beaches of Laguna Beach, Huntington Beach and Long Beach.

We were due to collect a Hertz EV Managers Special from the new LAX Rental Center, so we grabbed an Uber from the hotel to save our aching feet.

It took us a while to work out the features of the Kia Niro EV. It became evident very quickly that it hadn’t been designed that well.

The Sat Nav was awful. The screen was small, so you had very little space to show the route.

It couldn’t find well-known places and generally made things difficult to organise a drive to any destination.

There wasn’t enough room above the brake and accelerator to cater for my big trainers.

So, every time I wanted to brake, I couldn’t just swivel on my heel. If I tried to, the top of my trainer would hit the underside of the dash panel.

Therefore, I had to physically move my foot away from the accelerator and then move it toward the brake pedal. I got used to it, but that can’t be good design.

We finally got on our way. We soon hit the traffic on the PCH heading down to Long Beach. It was then chocker all the way to Dana Point.

We were relieved when we arrived. We both needed a snooze, but our room wasn’t ready.

We arrived just before 3pm and check in didn’t officially start until 4pm.

Whilst waiting for our room, we noticed that the clocks were due to go forward in the US. I enquired at the front desk and they advised the clocks go forward on Sun night heading into Mon morning, which seemed really weird. What do I know?

We had booked a corner suite with two balconies, but we’re on the second floor, so just one floor up from the foyer. The hotel had two floors above our room.

Consequently, the view of the ocean was obscured by trees. There’s not much point in having two balconies if you can’t see anything!

As soon as we got into our room, we had to get changed. We were booked into a nice-looking Mexican just down the road: Carmelita’s.

The walk into town was a bit unusual. We weren’t allowed to walk along the PCH.

We had to walk along an access road and the footpath was narrow with the additional danger of cycles attempting to share the same footpath!

Although the sun was still out, it was a tad chilly, but the half mile walk woke us up.

Carmelita’s was pretty decent. The food was good, althugh Vick had a bit of a battle to keep the door to the restaurant closed – the breeze coming in was making her feel really cold.

We enjoyed a lovely black bean dip with our free tortilla chips as a starter. Vick enjoyed fajitas as a main and I went for something new: a dish called La Tampiquena, which comprised prime skirt steak sat on top of cheese enchiladas. Nice.

Holiday to Indian Wells in Mar 2025