Hello from Waco, TX<\/p>\n
Wednesday August 17, 2022 (First post of this travelogue)<\/p>\n
We are in what is called Waco North at the Holiday Inn (Google Map)<\/a>.<\/p>\n {google_map}31.80292 -97.10215{\/google_map}<\/p>\n This is the first major stop on our journey to New Orleans for Pat\u2019s conference.\u00a0 We decided to drive to the conference and make a couple of fun stops along the way.<\/p>\n Waco was at the top of the list for our stops.\u00a0 We are big \u201cFixer Upper\u201d tv show fans and, of course the show focused on the Waco area.\u00a0 We had planned to visit Waco in 2019 with some of her family from the Corning, IA area.\u00a0 Unfortunately, she was badly injured in a UTV accident just prior to the planned trip and her recovery precluded the visit.\u00a0 We kept the visit on her bucket list and this is the first opportunity we have had.<\/p>\n Our hotel is about 17 miles north of the center of Waco, but every Holiday Inn property we checked was fully booked.\u00a0 Indeed, we got the last room at this location.\u00a0 We booked three nights so that we can explore the area at a leisurely pace.<\/p>\n 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).\u00a0 Well, it turns out that this is move-in week at Baylor University.<\/p>\n Our journey here began on Monday when we traveled to Raton, NM.\u00a0 From there we drove to Childress, TX.\u00a0 We had planned to limit our travel days to less than 400 miles and those stops fit the plan.\u00a0 They also had Holiday Inn properties.<\/p>\n If you have followed my blogs, you know that I have developed a love\/hate relationship with Holiday Inns.\u00a0 They have become very expensive in the past few years.\u00a0 I have made three trips without Pat in the past year and tried some low-cost alternatives, including Motel 6.\u00a0 Those stays were very marginal albeit about half the price of HI.\u00a0 For this trip I just could not subject Pat to those kinds of rooms, so we are back to our old faithful — Holiday Inns.\u00a0 We \u201clove\u201d the consistent good quality rooms (mostly).\u00a0 However, the hate part of the equation includes the cost factor, and the drastic reduction in the value of rewards points.\u00a0 I am at the platinum elite status, but that does not seem to result in any significant benefits at least in recent years.<\/p>\n That is all for this post.\u00a0 More in a subsequent posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading