While the kiddos were busy on their vacation, we had an amazing time in Palm Springs, CA! We were in Palm Springs for Chad to play in the Golf Channel Amateur Tour National Championship event - pretty exciting that he qualified for the 3rd year in a row (though this was only our 2nd time attending). We arrived without incident...well...except for the fact that Chad's golf clubs didn't make it - not cool! We filed a report and went on to our resort, in a Chevy Camero Convertible - awesome!! The drive was beautiful - it was so fun to see the mountains right away in the distance and odd to feel like we were in the mountains when it was so HOT! Desert mountains are definitely different but they were very cool! We checked in to the resort and the tournament before grabbing lunch. Luckily, before dinner, the clubs arrived - whew! The welcome dinner was fantastic - food was great and the entertainment was an interview with Kelly Tillman and David Feherty - it was so fun to see them in person and the interview was great!
The next four days, Chad enjoyed rounds of golf at 4 PGA West courses - Palmer Private, Greg Norman, Nickalaus Tournament & TPC Stadium (Pete Dye). While he was playing golf, I had an awesome run on a trail near the mountains, went to the fitness center, spent some time at the spa, sat by the pool and even caught-up on some scrapbooking! That and walked 18 holes with him on his last tournament day (luckily, the day he teed off the earliest when it was cooler!). Chad had an awesome round on the first day and was in 7th. His 2nd & 3rd rounds still had him in the running for the top 15 but unfortunately the last day did not treat him as well. He still improved his overall score by 47 strokes over last year's National's event and had a great time. The courses were beautiful and tough but I believe ones he will remember for a long time!
On Thursday, we started our vacation time together! We began the day with a trip to the fitness center. Then we made the trip to the Arial Tramway which took us from ~2,000 feet to ~9,000 feet in under 10 minutes. I'm not a fan of heights but always love the views when I get there! The tram was amazing once I got past my fear. It traveled very smoothly up huge heights, through 5 climate zones, without much more than a gentle swing when going across the towers. So cool. The temperature was 20-30 degrees cooler at the top than what we left at our resort - we were thankful for our jackets to say the least! We walked around the base station, ventured into the National Park and took a 1.5 mile hike. The altitude made it a bit tough to breathe but the views were absolutely amazing!! At one point Chad wanted to sit close to a ledge - I thought we were about 5 feet from the edge, Chad says we were 50 feet - likely, it was something in the middle! After our hike, we had dinner at the top with a fantastic view - can't be beat!
Then on Friday, we went to Joshua Tree National Park which was about an hour from our resort. We had a tip from our concierge to check-out a local restaurant in Joshua Tree before going into the park - definitely not a place we would have normally gravitated to but it was great! Then we spent the next almost two hours driving around the park and stopping to check-out the views. The rock formations were awesome and the Joshua Trees were obviously very plentiful! The drive was even better in a convertible! We, however, didn't bring our jackets and wished we had them!
Saturday wrapped-up our trip with our travel home. Although we had a fantastic time, we were ready to head home and see the kiddos on Sunday morning!
1 comment:
Sounds like you had a great time - super pictures!
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