Starwood Preferred Guest just announced a promotion from now until August 31, 2015 where you can get a bonus 1000 Starpoints whenever you have a stay that includes a weekend night (defined as Fri, Sat or Sun except in the middle east where it is Thu, Fri, and Sat).
This promotion can be a sweet deal especially if you have a low cost one night weekend stay to boost your points earnings. To maximize it if you didn’t mind moving properties a bit, you could do three different SPG properties on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights and get 3000 extra Starpoints plus you get to see different properties too!
I recently used 10,000 Starpoints a night to score this room in Detroit during the Movement music festival. Paid rates were $379 a night which gave me a value of 3.79 cents per point! This promotion will get you 10% of a free room like this every time you use it which is pretty nice!
Free points are always welcome. We will see what the other chains come up with this quarter to find the best value and let you know our thoughts!
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I have to admit I was a little concerned when I saw this sign! Why would I tease the wild monkeys?!
And sure enough next thing I know I saw a red faced monkey heading my way…. But wait, what was that underneath her?
OMG it is a baby monkey!
And then the rest of the gang showed up. And by gang, I really mean it! These guys were ruthless, grabbing bags of food and candy right out of the hands of the throngs of Chinese tourists.
The formations look amazing with the clouds just covering the tops.
But I wanted to go up, up, up via the cable car to get a better view.
What!? It has a glass floor? Ooooooh
What an amazing view going up!
Once on the top of the mountain, I quickly realized I was literally in the clouds! 
This made for some cool shots, but really it was just about zero visibility.
To see how bad the visibility was in the rain clouds: For example, this is what the “Five Finger” formations was supposed to look like from where I was.
This was what I saw on that day.
I thought maybe stopping at this Gallery would help, but it didn’t end up being what I thought it was. 🙂
This pagoda up on the top of the mountain did look cool in the clouds though.
I took the cable car back down and got some other good shots once I got out of the clouds.
I then went on a hike at the base level where the visibility was better.
You can see the scale of some of the formations next to this building
It was right after this creek that I made a critical error.
I was happily plodding along a nice trail and saw a staircase jutting off to the left going straight up the mountain. I thought to myself “I came here to take the path less traveled!” and so up the stairs I went. And up. And up. And up. And the further I went, the more committed to getting to the top I became. It ended up being like the stairmaster from Hell and while I was taking a break, I saw this coming my way!
When I got back up on the mountain I was back into zero visibility again but ran into this Avatar inspired photo op spot.
This bridge certainly looked foreboding. But I crossed it!
It was about this time that I ended up getting lost in the park! The signs were a bit ambiguous and asking people was no help because no one spoke English. After a while I decided to go back the way I came in which meant going back down the thousands of stairs I took to get to the top of the mountain. And all this was at the end of the day, the sun was setting and my phone battery went dead! So imagine me running down the trails trying to get out of the park before dark while monkeys were howling from the woods. I finally made it out in darkness and of course all the buses had stopped running. There was a little string of shops right outside of the park and there were some street vendors cooking stir fry and drinking beers. I ended up befriending them and they let me charge my phone and share their fire since it was a little cool that night. One of them even ended up acting as a taxi to take me the 30 minutes back to my hotel! Another great story about how friendly the Chinese people can be.
In the Ibis elevator, I had to take a picture of this awesome sign.
The next morning, I took the tourist bus (which leaves from the train station) to the area east of Xi’an where the Terracotta warriors were discovered in 1974. Hard to believe that no one even knew about this amazing feat before then! This was built as a tomb for the First Emperor of a unified China, Emperor Qin. He ascended to the throne when he was only 13 and immediately ordered the start of construction on his tomb. He was advised that whatever he was buried in his tomb with would go on with him to the afterlife which is why he decided to bury thousands (estimated 10,000) of these Terracotta Warriors to protect him after his death, including some people and horses alive. 700,000 people worked on his tomb during his life and after his death. This is Pit 1. 
And a video of me walking into the main room for the first time.
This wasn’t your American neighborhood Walmart! (and 
