Hello and thank you to my Secret Pal for such a wonderful and lovely surprise.
But we were oh so disappointed at not meeting with your friend Claryce Manchester who so very kindly delivered the gorgeous chocolates to our hotel in Las Vegas. We had a call from the bell desk to say that there was a delivery for us - which really took us by surprise, but because of a slight mix up we didn't get the message until the next day which was why I didn't call Claryce's daughter until the following afternoon. Your lovely gift really brightened our day as did Alice's call. Briefly we had been up and ready for our coach pick up at 6.50am for our trip to the Grand Canyon, the driver threw us off the coach because we were not on his list despite agreeing that all our paper work was in order, it was highly embarrassing and very distressing as I had confirmed our booking with the tour company only the previous afternoon. The next 3 - 4 hours were spent trying to sort out the problem as no other trips were available. The coach company had put down the wrong date, for four days earlier. As we were leaving Las Vegas we had resigned ourselves to not getting to see the canyon and were feeling pretty sick about it all, especially as Papillon the helicopter operator were still expecting us! to cut a long story short, by 11.30 Papillon got back to us and said that they had been able to arrange something for us, they would fly us out to the grand canyon from Las Vegas (at their expense) so we could make our trip. We couldn't believe what we were hearing, but Papillon were absolutely brilliant. To date the manager of Showtime Tours (who messed up the trip) has not accepted any of our repeated telephone calls and has not responded to our letter of complaint at their shoddy behaviour. They have made no apology and their attitude was basically tough ****. We were also dealing with a problem with our hire car at the same time too. The air conditioning packed up and the firms 24 hour roadside assitance didn't materialise, in fact they wanted us to detour 200miles to them! So we were faced with driving through Death Valley and on to Las Vegas with no air conditioning, the temperature was averaging 115F. We made it, we survived the journey, but we literally fried - people we spoke to were absolutely horrified when we told them about the journey. We had gallons of water on board which we desperately needed, but it didn't stay cool for long as it reached cup of coffee/tea temperature very very quickly. We finally got the car replaced in Santa Barbara (another long story) having had to also make the journey across the Mojove Dessert too! We covered almost a 1000 miles without air conditioning! So as you see we had a rather interesting stay in Las Vegas, but thank you again for being a brilliant Secret Pal and as Clint would sort of say "making our day". Nicky back home in Suffolk To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
