Holiday to Indian Wells in Mar 2025: Day 8 – Palm Springs to Los Angeles

By Nige on March 12, 2025 at 2:44 pm
Type: Post
Story: Holiday to Indian Wells in Mar 2025 Category: Travel
Tags: Hertz | Hilton | Holidays | Los Angeles | Palm Springs

Our final day in a Trump-controlled US. We were due to fly back to Heathrow this evening, and all our activities today were geared towards getting on our BA flight back home.

I was up early as normal and was told off by the Vickster for typing too loudly! The virtual keyboard was in use thereafter.

We headed out on our normal early morning Starbucks walk. It was another chilly morning, but at least it was dry.

Our plan was to head to Santa Monica, just past LAX, which seemed to have a plethora of high-speed chargers.

Once we were done there, we would stop off at The Cheesecake Factory at Marina del Rey for some nosh.

Finally, on to Hertz to drop the car off by around 2pm. Our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until almost 7pm.

We enjoyed another Hilton Garden Inn breakfast before hitting the road around 7:30am.

Our first target was a combined Starbucks and charger stop near Riverside. It was a lovely drive out of the greater Palm Springs area.

It was much clearer this morning, and the views of the mountains were wonderful.

It took about 45 mins or so to reach Starbucks. Just as we left the I-10, a traffic jam started to form, which we believed was as a result of an accident further up the road.

We hoped it might have cleared by the time we had drunk and charged. It hadn’t.

The dreadful Kia sat nav suggested it would take 2 hours to reach Santa Monica for our final charge up, but luckily, the benefit of the HOV lane came into its own.

The High Occupancy Vehicle lane is for vehicles with at least 2 occupants. Aimed primarily at car sharing.

Since we qualified, we were able to speed down the outside lane, whilst the vast majority of vehicles were stuck in a traffic jam. That cut down the expected time by 10-15 mins.

The final 20 miles was desperately slow, but we finally arrived at a busy charging station at the Santa Monica Civic Center.

Charging was slow – no more than 40kw. Checking online suggested that the Kia Niro is only capable of charging at a max power of 80kw. Another item in the con column for the Kia.

We arrived at The Cheesecake Factory around midday, and it wasn’t long before we were enjoying stuffed mushrooms and chaquitos, followed for our favourite cheesecakes with extra raspberry sauce.

It was very tasty indeed. By the time we finally found the Hertz rental car return, it was nearly 1:30pm.

Holiday to Indian Wells in Mar 2025