Monday, August 21, 2006

Black Hills - Part I

Last Wednesday we left for the Black Hills. It was a very fun trip! Dean and the kids have never been to the Black Hills and they really enjoyed it there. I was afraid Dean wasn't going to come home - he LOVED it there!! Anyways, I am a planner and Dean is a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants-type of guy so he was really worried about this vacation. He was afraid that I would be the vacation Nazi. What can I say? I take after my dad! Anyways, I had an itinerary planned for our entire trip because you really have to have some sort of itinerary or you'll end up running all over the Black Hills to make it to all the attractions you want to see! Well, after the first day we found out my itinerary wasn't going to work too well. I was way too lenient with our time - the total opposite of what Dean thought I would be. Oh well, we got to add other attractions to our itinerary so we got to see even more than I had anticipated.

We left town about 3:30 and made it to Rapid City about 9 pm (8 pm MT). I was kinda worried about the hotel reservation. I had to make two separate reservations because I had enough Trip Rewards point for a free night. However, the free night has to be booked separately from the rest of your stay. Needless to say, we had problems when we got there. They told me they only had my reservation for the 3 nights and that they had upgraded me to a suite because the standard rooms were overbooked. I said no way, I booked a suite to begin with and that there should also be a reservation for my free night. Well, after some searching through the computer, they finally found my free night but told me that it was for a standard room. Again, I said no way, the free room was supposed to be a suite which is why I booked the rest of my stay in a suite so I wouldn't have to switch rooms during our stay. Finally, they got everything straightened out, however, they told me I would have to stop back after my three night stay to check out, check in and reswipe our key cards. Very inconvenient. But wait, there's more!

After all that, then we get up to our room (top floor, of course) and our key cards don't work. So I go back down to the front desk to get them reswiped then head back up. This time they worked. We got everything into the room when I noticed we didn't have the pull-out sofa we had requested. We had a jacuzzi tub instead. While Dean and the kids waited in the room, I went back down to the front desk and told them we have four people in our room and one king bed is not going to work. We need the pull-out sofa we requested when we made the reservation. They said they could get me the sofa but I'd have to forgo the jacuzzi. Which was totally fine. So they give us the room directly across from our original room. They reswiped our original keys. As we were transferring our belongings from one room to the other, the kids didn't hold the door open which locked us out of the old room because they had reswiped our cards with the new room. So Dean went back down to the front desk to request a card to get into the old room to get the rest of our stuff. Finally we got settled into our room that we requested. Talk about a HUGE ordeal!!! After that, we all went swimming and hot-tubbing because we definitely needed some relaxation.

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