Peachtree City - December 2023

 We had to make a quick trip to Atlanta to drop off our new-to-us used Model S at the Tesla Service Center in Fayetteville.  We originally thought about doing the drive in a day but heavy rain was predicted that Saturday morning and people were warning us about a lot of traffic for the huge Alabama/Georgia game that day in Atlanta.  So I found us a hotel and we headed out Friday night.

This hotel turned out to be a great find so I want to memorialize it in my blog.  We stayed at the Crown Plaza Atlanta SW - Peachtree City.  The rates were quite cheap, likely because we were there on such a quiet night.  There were very few cars in the parking lot and we saw almost no one else.

We arrived after dark and found the four charging stations all unoccupied.  Coming in so late you never know whether the chargers will be open.  It's common at hotels (and elsewhere) for ICE cars to take over the spots even though they clearly have no need for the electricity.  

The hotel is a convention center with multiple hotel buildings plus the buildings for meeting rooms and common spaces.  They have a nice indoor pool which we used that evening and a restaurant on site.  Our room was located in the Lakeside building and had a view of the small lake that the buildings surround.  I understand the hotel had been renovated fairly recently and everything felt pretty new.

This a view of the building we stayed in.  On the first floor is a room with the curtains pulled and a light on which was our room.

We never saw the geese but based on other signs, it sounds like they nest on the property.  Geese can be aggressive so I suggest believing the sign!

Orange Beach - A Vacation from a Vacation - Thanksgiving Weekend

This summer when we were looking for ways to use our hotel loyalty points and weekend trips we could take, I suggested the beach for Thanksgiving weekend.  So we booked it and then when Paul went to put it on the calendar, he said something to the effect of, "honey, do you realize how close that is to our Galapagos trip?"  I hadn't but it turned out to be a good thing.  We desperately needed some peaceful down time.

We've been to the beach many times so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this post but I did want a quick documentation of the weekend for our historical records.  I find this blog a nice place to go to see when we last visited somewhere and where we stayed.

Being Thanksgiving weekend, we thought we should celebrate Thanksgiving. So we brought the ingredients for turkey sandwiches including some pre-made relish from Publix.  Our first chance to celebrate was as we charged on the way down.

This might be a good spot to mention the car challenge we ran into leaving Birmingham.  Earlier this week we had picked up a used Model S.  About 20 minutes out of Birmingham, a BMS warning came on telling us the car may not restart.  This appeared to relate to the battery management system which is pretty important so we turned around to switch cars.  Fortunately, the car was still under warranty.

This year for the first time, we had reached Platinum Elite with Marriott.  For this trip we had booked the Fairfield Inn in Orange Beach using points and we had applied to use our Suite Night Awards (pending availability).  About a week before the trip, we received an e-mail indicating we had been upgraded to an Executive Suite with a Balcony!

Our time on the beach was spent taking it easy - walking or sitting on the beach and listening to the sounds of the waves and shorebirds.  Sunrise Saturday morning was just breathtaking!

The boardwalk to get to the beach