Our "Grand" Adventure!

Our room!  Lovely

Christmas time in Utah means an annual trip to the big city to see the lights at Temple Square and eat a carb loaded dinner at The Old Spaghetti Factory.  It's tradition, and even though we don't do it every year, when we do go we do the same things every time.  This year was the Grandest of all years yet.  We decided to splurge a bit this year and book a big ole room at the Grand America Hotel.  If you read a little about it, it is the only 5 star hotel in Utah and was built in 2002 for the Winter Olympics in SLC.  It is wonderful!  Beautiful, and actually quite family oriented.  I mean how many 5 star hotels would you feel comfortable walking into in your jeans let alone with your 4 children in tow?  This place was crawling with families with tons of kids, and exuded Christmas time cheer.  Hot chocolate chip cookies at check in, and beautiful decorations everywhere.

James decided to go big all around.  He splurged and decided on getting valet parking.  Self parking was $10 and valet was $15 so James being the big spender went valet.  I will admit I tried to talk him out of it.  I'm cheap sometimes, but I will never second guess my Jimmy again.  We checked in, checked out our room and made reservations for dinner at the Spaghetti Factory and then headed downstairs to get our car again.  We waited for a few minutes when the valet came running up to us with this look on his face.  I thought for sure they had crashed the truck.  It's a beast!  It's huge, and hard to park even when no one is parked on either sides of you.  I know!  I've been known to walk long distances just so I can park in peace with no one around.  But that wasn't the case.  Actually they had lost the keys to our truck, and were in a huge panic.  They apologized profusely, and offered rides where ever we needed to go while they found our keys.  We weren't put out.  We knew if worse came to worse we had an extra set back home in Avon.  We'd just be stuck in lovely Grand America Paradise for a bit longer.

So were were shuttled in the hotel's Lexus everywhere we needed to go.  The Spaghetti Factory, Temple Square, and back.  It was actually really nice.  We didn't have to worry about parking at all.  When we finally got back to the hotel, the valet reported that they had indeed found our keys.  They had fallen out of the valets pocket into another car and that owner had returned them.  They again apologized profusely.  We went up to our room to find a huge tray of chocolate chip cookies, cold milk and chocolate dipped strawberries.  There was also a very nice note attached.  Actually it was an extremely nice note.  In it they apologized for our inconvenience, and told us to enjoy our stay.............FREE OF CHARGE!!  Get out of town!!  That never happens, but it did.  Our Grand America stay was free!  I called down the next morning to thank the manager for their generosity.  The cookies and milk were more than enough, but they went above and beyond for a few hours of missing keys.

So we are never going to stay anywhere but the Grand America.  I think I could stay there forever and eat chocolate chip cookies.  So thank you again to the Grand America.  You made our stay unforgettable, and a birthday weekend magical.  The moral of the story here though my dear friends is, always get valet parking.  It's worth the extra $5 any day:)