This weekend, we took a short vacation to exotic Banning, CA! It took a little less than 2 hours to get there, not counting our stop to eat lunch and go to Walmart for supplies. We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express there, and it was really surprisingly nice!! We had a fancy king suite, with two rooms, a big bathroom, and a little bar area. They even had a great continental breakfast with cinnabuns, omelettes, and biscuits and gravy!
One huge room had rows and rows of classic cabinet arcade games; the other had more rows of pinball games.
They had everything from the old Atari games to Fix It Felix Jr. from Wreck-It Ralph. They even had the original Mario Bros game (they weren't Super yet), wherein you knocked down turtles from below, and then kicked them. (Why does Mario hate turtles so much? Did a turtle kill someone he loved?)
The other room had hundreds of pinball games.
Jurassic Park was a fun one; there was a t-rex that tried to eat your ball.
Back to the Future pinball!
They also had quite a few super old ones. Of course, they didn't have as many bells and whistles as the modern ones do, but I'd never seen any like these, so that was pretty cool.
They even had a super big Hercules pinball machine!
There was also a smaller room with some original shooting games. I had no idea there were any games like these.
Some of them just had miniature things, like actual physical things, in the distance for you to shoot at.
Some of them superimposed figures over glass. It was hard to tell where you were aiming though.
They also had a mini bowling game!
It was a TON of fun playing all these arcade and pinball games, most of which I'd never even seen before! We hung out there for a good 4 hours, before we went over to Morongo Casino for some food. This Native American casino is what Banning is probably known best for. We hit up Potrero Canyon Buffet. (Make sure to sign up for the rewards program, and they'll knock 5 bucks off your price!) I was pleasantly surprised by the selection! It's probably one of the better buffets I've been to. I had two huge platefuls of food, plus another one with desserts! I was stuffed after that.
We didn't do very much gambling while we were there, but I couldn't resist playing this Garfield slot game!
The next day, after we'd lazed around the hotel room for a bit, we went over to the Desert Hills outlet center. It has so many stores, you literally can't walk the entire thing.
We hit up a bunch of stores in one area of it, and found some good deals at the Banana Republic and Express outlets.
For dinner, we hit up the buffet at Morongo again (two days in a row, it was that good!). This time, I knew exactly what foods to load up on, and what to avoid. I didn't eat quite as much as the night before, but pretty close to it.
We went for some after-dinner drinks at Cielo, a restaurant/bar that's located on the 26th floor. We sat at a table by the huge windows, and had a beautiful view of the surrounding mountains and farm areas.
Old fashioneds at 400 feet up.
It rained a bit on our way back, making the mountains look quite misty.
It was a pretty great weekend!
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