Hello from Waco, TX
Wednesday August 17, 2022 (First post of this travelogue)
We are in what is called Waco North at the Holiday Inn (Google Map).
{google_map}31.80292 -97.10215{/google_map}
This is the first major stop on our journey to New Orleans for Pat’s conference. We decided to drive to the conference and make a couple of fun stops along the way.
Waco was at the top of the list for our stops. We are big “Fixer Upper” tv show fans and, of course the show focused on the Waco area. We had planned to visit Waco in 2019 with some of her family from the Corning, IA area. Unfortunately, she was badly injured in a UTV accident just prior to the planned trip and her recovery precluded the visit. We kept the visit on her bucket list and this is the first opportunity we have had.
Our hotel is about 17 miles north of the center of Waco, but every Holiday Inn property we checked was fully booked. Indeed, we got the last room at this location. We booked three nights so that we can explore the area at a leisurely pace.
I was kind of surprised that Waco was booked up his time of year when it is so hot down here (well over 100 degrees each day). Well, it turns out that this is move-in week at Baylor University.
Our journey here began on Monday when we traveled to Raton, NM. From there we drove to Childress, TX. We had planned to limit our travel days to less than 400 miles and those stops fit the plan. They also had Holiday Inn properties.
If you have followed my blogs, you know that I have developed a love/hate relationship with Holiday Inns. They have become very expensive in the past few years. I have made three trips without Pat in the past year and tried some low-cost alternatives, including Motel 6. Those stays were very marginal albeit about half the price of HI. For this trip I just could not subject Pat to those kinds of rooms, so we are back to our old faithful — Holiday Inns. We “love” the consistent good quality rooms (mostly). However, the hate part of the equation includes the cost factor, and the drastic reduction in the value of rewards points. I am at the platinum elite status, but that does not seem to result in any significant benefits at least in recent years.
That is all for this post. More in a subsequent posts.