Breakfast included another omelette freshly cooked with potatoes on the side this time. Yummy and thought I’d load up as we have a drive today and going to do a bit of walking too. Not sure when we’ll have someone cooking fresh for us so took advantage of the opportunity presented by Embassy Suites. Also had the orange and passionfruit juice which was so refreshing. We hit the road right on 8.00am as planned heading to North Arizona. Weather is sunny and a bit cooler when we left but was still forecast to reach 40 degrees in Phoenix but as we are heading for the mountains it will hopefully not be much hotter than 30 today. It was amazing to see so many cactus plants along the drive and suddenly when we reached a certain altitude ... read more

Alarm went off at 6am and after having had a pretty good sleep and figuring out how to turn the stupid shower on we went down for the complimentary breakfast which they were actually charging non IHG members USD 20- each. I had a light breakfast with some cereal bran with toast and strawberry jam with an interesting strawberry and banana yoghurt (I’m not convinced they go well together ?). I asked for a coffee and they give me a coffee urn (seriously one cup is enough to start the day !). We checked out at 7.40 am and were back on the free shuttle for the 10 minutes trip to LAX to get our Southwest flight. We had already been checked in using the early bird check in system when we we left Brisbane and ... read more

Test... read more

It was nice to wake up and no that we were not hitting the road again. This was our first three night stop so time to relax a little bit more. The room here is really nice it has been recently renovated with hardwood floors and a brand new bathroom with a shower that is not inside a bathtub which is cool. The balcony outside is really nice to get some fresh air. It was a pretty wet start to the day and we were glad we did Dollywood yesterday. I looked at the radar on Accuweather website which has been really accurate at predicting the storms we have seen lately and it looked like we might have a few windows where the weather was going to be OK but it was going to be on ... read more

Breakfast in the hotel restaurant was great but pretty expensive for what we had. Kerry & I had a granola yoghurt and Elise had a lovely omelette. We all had really good sleeps here, the beds were huge and you almost needed a ladder to climb up into bed ! Antique and period fittings made it cool and the room had the most comfortable sittings chairs I have ever seen. Anyway we hit the road for what was always going to be the longest day of our road trip. I decided against backtracking on Interstate 64 and instead decided to drive down Highway 219 and this route would take us past some countryside and small towns. We came across this town called Union which had some amazing old homes. It has a population of about 500 ... read more