Holiday to Las Vegas in Dec 2013: Day 6 – Palm Springs

By Nige on Tue 24 Dec 2013 at 20:01
Type: Post
Story: Holiday to Las Vegas in Dec 2013
Tags: Hilton | Palm Springs

Woke at 3:30am – Vick is dealing with the jet lag better than I am at the mo. Intending on going up the aerial tramway this morning, and it’s going to be cold up there, so we have brought our hats, gloves and scarves with us.

We will also be switching hotels today, so we are moving to the HGI at Rancho Mirage (just down the road).

Breakfast was nice – get the impression that if the hotel was busier that it may have been a buffet style, but this ended up being served a la carte to our table.

We got $8.50 continental vouchers and then ordered individual items and got the value knocked off. American style eggs, Canadian bacon and breakfast potatoes went down nicely – very tasty indeed.

After breakfast we headed off to the Aerial Tramway – got there for about 7:45am; first car up scheduled for 8am and we were second party on – perfect.

Nice shots on the way up. Nice walk along the desert view trail with 5 “notches” (i.e. view points) which offered some stunning views.

Spent about 2 hours at that attraction and by this time it was getting really warm (top down weather – convertible top down just to be clear). Even up at the top it was nicely warm, so all the cold weather coats, scarves and gloves were not needed after all.

Headed back into town and we popped into Starbucks and then back to the hotel for sorting photos and blogs before checking out and heading to Rancho Mirage.

Checked into the HGI at Rancho Mirage and asked for a room overlooking the pool on the top floor. None available!

Three times now we have got rooms on the wrong side! “How do you go about getting a room overlooking the pool?”. “Well there are only a few and there’s never a guarantee of getting one”. Ok let’s have a look at the room you’ve allocated to us.

Well what a rubbish room – no view whatsoever other than a view of a series of air conditioning fans, and the noise of, well, air conditioning fans. Not happy.

“Well if you don’t like that room, I can upgrade you to a suite but it has two Queen beds not a King bed.” “Let’s have a look see.” Well room is fab, overlooking the pool as we requested. Why couldn’t we have been assigned this room to start with!!!

Anyway now we have a room we are happy with (and by the way that’s the second time we have said we were unhappy with the room and we have been upgraded to suites on both occasions so think we might have a new strategy here…), we stuck some washing on and went across to the mall to get a small bite to eat. Small because we plan to go to the Cheesecake Factory tonight.

Ended up at Starbucks for a panini; Vick had a fruit salad thing. Headed back and put the washing on to dry and sat out in the sun by the pool for a bit. Still haven’t gone for a swim – the pool here was not heated and it was freezing. Can’t complain too much since the temp here is 72 deg, and lovely.

Vick has started playing Free Flow on her iPhone – I stumbled across it last week and it’s a very addictive game, so we ended up sat on the sofa for an hour prior to going out for dinner both of us playing this game. Boring…

Dinner was at the Cheesecake Factory as planned – we dolled up a little since it was Christmas Eve after all. Kept the food in check, and left room for cheesecake which we took back to the hotel. Little bit subdued – I think I wasn’t feeling very christmassy, and I was thinking about J heading away.

Watched the majority of a film called Broken City with Mark Wahlberg, Russell Crowe and Catherine Zeta Jones, but couldn’t make it to the end.

Follow the whole story here: Holiday to Las Vegas in Dec 2013