Larry & Pamela D.

Pamela and I married September 4th, 1982 of course it is the Labor Day holiday. The owner of the company that she still works for gave her a wedding present of a 1 night stay at Madonna Inn on our way up to San Francisco where we planned to spend a week for our honey moon. We were lucky to get a room that evening as Jerry Lewis was hosting the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon of which was a regular scheduled event for each year. We stayed in the Highway Suite that night and most likely was one of the only rooms available. We learned early on we would have to book our rooms each year almost a year in advance or there wouldn’t be much choice if we waited too long!!

We returned every year for 25 years without a break. Everything was planned around Labor Day. We had 2 different rooms each year and the staff would move our luggage from one room to the other for us while we were doing our visiting San Luis Obispo or Hearst Castle. We never missed a year for those 25 years  and even a lot of times returning from up north, and back east, would stop in with the children on other vacations. Most of those rooms were down on the lower levels where the larger suites were.

Now we still come up as often as we can get away from our volunteer jobs. In fact we were just there this past year. That and others since the 50 mark makes our total quite  a lot of different rooms over the years.

I am not sure if it was after Alex died, but we saw where they were renting his private room(Yahoo) to special customers. We were allowed to stay in it one of our nights some time back. We still consider going just to keep staying in rooms we have never had. Pam has made a book from the post cards on the racks in the office so we always can see the rooms we have already staid in. Our earlier years we staid in all the Rock Rooms and rooms with Rock Showers then started on the others.

We have appreciated the addition of the pool complex to enhance our stays as well.

You will notice in photos we have spent a lot of time & money in both gift shops.

Every year we came with our wedding attire from 1982 and always enjoyed our anniversary dinner at the Gold Rush Steak House, ordering cake to celebrate. We were lucky one year before Alex passed away he met us at the registration counter to ask if we had steak and how we enjoyed it!

Then every year the next day after dinner I would get up early and head down to the bakery to get a loaf of pull-apart bread with pecans for our breakfast. I had to get there early or they may run out! Sometimes I would have to wait for the loaves to cool.

I know this story is very long, but our memories are everlasting!! We love The Madonna Inn!!