A Real Vacation – Part 2 (The Madonna Inn)

The other day I wrote the first part of this, A Real Vacation – Part 1 (Anza Borrego). And after three days of literally having my phone turned off I was feeling pretty good. Unfortunately with severe winds the last night, it seemed that every time I fell asleep a wind gust would smack the tent and wake me up. So while the wind finally settled down about 4 AM, I wasn’t resting well and was fully awake at 7AM. So I got up and packed up camp and was ready to be on the road by 8AM.

Given that I was about a 5 hour drive to the place I was staying that night, I decided to stay analog and pulled out my paper map of California. I took the long way from Borrego Springs to San Luis Obispo via a cruise along the coast of the Salton Sea, around Twenty-nine Palms and Joshua Tree National Park and then across Route 66 heading west. It was a beautiful drive through the desert, a beautiful and long drive. I ended up arriving at the Madonna Inn about 4PM.

The Madonna Inn is someplace I’ve heard about for a long time. It’s an old and huge hotel complex with a secret garden, tennis courts, restaurants and a spa. It has a bunch of theme rooms from Elvis themes, to lots of cave-like rooms like the room I stayed in, the Swiss Rock Room. The room was certainly a trip with stone everything, floors, walls and a complete stone bathroom. It’s an older hotel, so the wifi wasn’t great and the set up was a bit odd, but I was paying for the experience. I walked down the street and picked up some good Chinese food and had a lovely night in the Swiss Rock Room.

A couple of pictures of the room

And some shots of the flowers in the secret garden