Hotel Blues

My wife and I are in the middle of a road trip, driving all over California.  We're visiting national parks and driving routes less traveled.  I've lived in California my whole life and there is still much of it I've never seen which I suspect is true for many.  After this trip is done, we'll have both visited places we've never been and taken highways we've never driven.  As always, we're on a budget and part of why we chose a road trip was to save some money by avoiding flights and expensive resorts on tropical islands.  We love the tropical island vacations but with a little Brewer on the way, we're trying to save a few bucks.  So, when we planned out our trip, we went cheap on most of our hotels.  More on that in a second.  Fortunately, we did fork out for a night at the Tenaya Lodge in Yosemite.  As you would expect from a higher end place, all the amenities were present.  The lobby was great, very comfortable and relaxing.  Any time the lobby is really nice, you can typically expect a nice room and good experience, which was the case here.

Other than the Tenaya Lodge, like I said, we went cheap.  And as always, you get what you pay for.  We're still midway through our vacation so we still have another few stops but we've already experienced some less than ideal hotel conditions that I thought I'd share in the form of a top ten list.  So this is the top ten things we got to experience this week in our lovely cheap hotel stays. 

1. Bugs.  Granted, we were in the desert, but we had a few visitors.  Nothing serious really.  We had a giant stink bug I was smart enough not to crush.  We also had a large spider and some winged thing I've never seen before.  Also, there was an alleged scorpion hanging out  by our front door.  I went out to the car to get something late in the evening and a drunk British guy was standing in front of our room with a flashlight.  "There's a big scorpion running around here", he slurred.  Then he looked at me very seriously and said "I don't like scorpions". 
2. Smoke detector wasn't working.  Or at least the little light was out.  I don't so much care about this one too much.
3. Cigarette burns and Spackle on the bed blankets.  This is typical in crappy hotels.  The blankets are nasty.  Sometimes you get the tiny bloodstains on the pillows and sheets.  yuck.
4. Noisier than hell.  Paper thin walls make it impossible to get a quiet sleep.  You can hear the dumbasses in the next room or out in front of the room.  We also got the 700 pound guy upstairs, doing calisthenics at 3:00 in the morning.  In our San Diego hotel, we were directly under the flight path and we could hear the planes flying over.  It sounded like they were about 10 feet or so above the hotel.
5. Broken refrigerator.  This isn't really a problem since we had an ice chest in the car.  We had some leftovers were wanted to put in the fridge but it was busted and not even running. 
6. The alarm clocks in two of the places were set to go off in middle of the night, causing me to have to fumble around in the dark, dead asleep, trying to turn the damn thing off.
7. The fans in the bathrooms were unnecessarily loud.  The fan automatically goes on when you turn on the light.  So in the middle of the night, the loud fans helps to wake us both up all the way.  Two of the places we stayed had a loud fan in the bathroom.  A fan does not need to be loud.  These fans made it sound like you were standing close to a giant assembly line in a factory.  I was waiting for the damn thing to fall out of the ceiling. 
8. Non-potable water.  One of the places we stayed had non-potable water for all outlets with the exception of one, clearly marked as drinking water.  Again, understandable since we were in the middle of nowhere in the desert.
9. Busted secondary door lock.  This really doesn't matter but when you are staying in a city I'd call "the butthole of the world", you can really benefit from locks on the doors.  Ours was clearly busted off, reattached and then busted off again.  I was envisioning a drug raid in the middle of the night, police ramming the door down to catch the drug dealers off guard.  Come to think of it, that would make sense given the disabled smoke alarm.  Someone was probably cooking up some crack and didn't want to set off the alarm, so they disabled it.  Then, the cops rammed the door down, causing one of the purps to drop their joint on the bed blankets, burning a hole in it.
10. Men will appreciate this one; wrong remote for the television.  The stupid remote didn't work with our television because it was the wrong remote.  Obviously frustrating. 
11. I was going to do a top ten but I have one more.  Somebody, at some point, pissed in the air conditioner.  We were hot and turned on the air conditioner to cool off the place.  Suddenly, almost immediately, the room reeked of a very strong urine smell.  That's nice.  Somebody must have pissed in it because I just can't think of another reason for the stench. 

So that's it.  Next time you want to go cheap on the hotel, just be prepared for these types of things. 

Comments

[Matt]

Great post buddy - felt like I was right there with you. Sounds like fun in spite of all the issues. Can't wait to hear more about the trip while I'm stuck here at work and sick too.