Spring Break 2014-Day One

It's been a while, hasn't it? But here goes some posts about how our Spring Break 2014 went.

Growing up I never went on a Spring Break vacation. It just wasn't something we did. My first Spring Break vacation wasn't until after I married my husband and we went on a road trip to Tennessee to see a friend*.

So now it's our second Spring Break vacation. Well, partial vacation/partial work conference for Hubby. Somebody had invited him to speak at a conference on communications and, hello, it was in Palm Springs! Sign me up!

We had arranged for the kiddos to go to Hubby's parents for the week. I was looking forward to getting away. Next time, I would love to take the kids with us. If there is a next time.

After getting up at the crack of dawn to catch an early flight, we were greeted by one of the most unfriendliest fellow airline employees, who apparently couldn't be bothered***. Flight delayed. Shocker. Our plan was to get to Palm Springs by way of Vegas.

We were able to get on a later flight and made it to Wichita, KS****. Woohoo! It didn't take long at all to get that plane turned around and off to Vegas.

We had some pretty awesome views of this great country we live in on the way. I'm not a window seat kind of person, but the person sitting in the window seat took some pics for me.

I've traveled to a few places. But there's still a large portion of this country I haven't seen. And it simply amazes me how God has shaped this world. His hands work wonders. And it's for our pleasure.

Once we finally touched down in Vegas we thought we'd have a rental car waiting for us. When we got to the lengthy line to wait for our turn, it was obvious that we would be waiting for a REALLY long time. So, I did what any good consumer would do. I went to another rental car counter to see what I could get. After I was informed I could get the same deal somewhere else without the wait, I called the other car rental agency that we had a car through to make sure we wouldn't be charged anything. Well. They had gone ahead and cancelled our rental because we hadn't picked it up by a certain time. Talk about livid! If we had waited any longer in that line just to find out our reservation was cancelled, I would have feared for the life behind that counter. Either one of us might have gone ballistic. We have learned we will never use that agency again.

When we signed all of the paperwork for our rental car, the lady gave us a map to Palm Springs. She said, "This will knock an hour off of your drive". Um. No. It added about an hour and a half, on top of the normal 4 hour drive. The route she showed us (and we took) was nothing but two lane roads, and trucks we couldn't pass*****. It was nothing but desert and ugly. We kept trying to think of it as an adventure. But it got hard to do that after a while. It was exhausting.

There was a member of Hubby's team also going on this trip. She flew in to Burbank and drove the rest of the way. She left a couple of hours after us, but got there before we did. We spent roughly thirteen hours traveling.

It could have turned into a day where we were wondering why we were doing this. But then we finally arrived at the hotel. What a great place!

Palm Springs has a great atmosphere. The hotel feels like a bygone era. There's very much a Rat Pack feel to it without feeling outdated. Our room was sweet! I mean a suite. Hubby got an upgrade since he was speaking at this conference. But our view was nothing special. The view was of the roof of the building next to us. Eh. This is a pic of a room just like ours. Except we had no view.There was also a living room.

We had arrived so late that we had missed the dinner to welcome all of the attendees of the conference. We went to the bar to see what we could scrounge up. What we ordered turned out to be a little less than satisfying. Chalk it up to being a little froo froo.

It was good to finally arrive at our destination. But it was time to collapse. Tomorrow will be a better day.


*We ended up coming home early, because our hosts couldn't stop fighting. Not fun.
**Well, after buying me a ticket that is.
***Do these people not remember they work in the service industry? I realize there are some doozy of some customers out there, but you can get back to your conversation with the other employee after I get my bags checked. And it got even worse on the trip home.
****Wright amendment, you will not be gone soon enough!
*****Either because the car couldn't get up enough RPMs or there were curves in the road and we couldn't see around them.