My Travels

Traveled out to the Valley of the Sun aka Phoenix for a college football game. Decided to make it a road trip and headed out late Friday evening. Since I was coming in late, I opted to stay somewhere relatively cheap without any resort amenities. Checked into the Homewood Suites by Hilton Phoenix-Biltmore hotel. The hotel was a little dated but the room was roomy for the group. The breakfast buffet was passable, I opted to have waffles since the buffet had a self serve waffle maker. I'm never a fan of scrambled eggs buffet style, just always too runny or dry... Hopped to the Sheraton Desert Oasis Villas hotel the next day. I wanted to hit the pool killing some time before the game in the evening. I didn't realize that this hotel was a timeshare resort. I would call this hotel a medium tier timeshare hotel and the clients tend to be retirees. At least as evidenced by the people in the pool. You can tell that the hotel caters to this group as the bathroom in the room was built ...

I decided to stay in town near work for work. Checked into the Doubletree by Hilton Santa Ana-Orange County Airport for the evening. Being near the airport, the hotel doesn't offer free parking but the front desk person was nice enough to give me a parking pass gratis. The hotel seems to share with an apartment/retail complex. There are parking but for residents and shoppers. It seems like the weekends are pretty dead for them so parking isn't that big of an issue. The room was pleasant and roomy for my purposes. The breakfast buffet in the restaurant was pretty basic although the servers does not seem to know english much. For dinner, went down the street to Rubino's Pizza . Ironically, a restaurant called Little Onion was next door. The only reason it caught my eye was that I saw a Living Social deal for it and had thought to myself, what's the likelihood of me being in this area to eat? One never knows! The pizza was adequate for me, the crust was think but the edges...