“And it’s tough traveling. You know, the hotels and the airports and all that. That part, eating and getting around to the hotel room and then going on.”~ Harvey Korman 
Part two of my ten days away from home required me to stay at a Super 8 hotel for two nights, so that I could see SIX MINUTE CENTURY perform. It was the only way.
We took off from the resort and drove the 20 minutes to get to this hotel. I found a deal on the Internet that a weekend reservation, that it was 15% off the price. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what I was needing, Friday and Saturday nights.
So I called and booked this hotel room and was told that I would be on the second floor. And it was all with taxes and fees under $100. SCORE!
But as I was getting dropped off and going into the hotel lobby to check in, my nephew came up from behind and gave me a drink that I had in my sister’s car that I had left behind on accident. How nice of him to come through and give it to me.
And then, the horror began. As he walked away to return to his mother, I heard him weeping openly… sad that I was leaving and not going home with him. It nearly killed me. But life goes on with me doing what I need and want to do.
I checked in, was given my key to the hotel room and then told “You’re on the first floor”. Umm okay? I made the reservation for the second floor but whatever. It would work out in a sense as there was NO elevator.
But now we have a huge accessibility problem as for every hotel room on the ground floor, there was a HUGE step to get through the door. Something that I would have a lot of difficulty in my wheelchair to manage for two nights.
And then the key wouldn’t work. Or at least I was never able to get it to work. So instead of fussing with it, I would throw the dead bolt to block the door from shutting all of the way and locking me out and then go on and do what I needed to do.
I DO NOT recommend doing this! I left myself really exposed to being robbed of everything I had in the hotel room. And yes, I would have been the one responsible for everything that would have been stolen. Luckily, I had everything still when I left. But I did allow the door to shut when I was leaving to go see SIX MINUTE CENTURY. And I decided that I was going to fight with this door when I got back from the concert.
It would be a fight that I would lose and I had to go to the front desk to ask for help at 1 AM.
But let me back track some to let you in on all of the trials and tribulations that I had with this hotel, that has caused me to set aside some time to either write a letter or an e-mail and make phone calls to file multiple complaints against this hotel. Yeah, Dambreaker is pissed again.
Friday evening, I was aware that I would not see anyone from the circles of SIX MINUTE CENTURY until Saturday evening. So I had the entire day to myself. But where this hotel was located, was not attached to sidewalks. So roaming somewhere nearby to find something to eat on Friday was not in the cards, so I did without and of course when I don’t eat, I get headaches and migraines. And I didn’t want pizza delivery because I had gone through that a lot while spending the week with my family. Kind of burned out on it.
As I was in the room, I fought with the air conditioning unit, trying to get it to cool off in there. But the dial actually just spun around in circles and I never felt or heard any “clicks” from setting to setting. Eventually I found the setting to make the hotel room feel like the Arctic Circle.
Then I laid in bed and watched television. The television however would only allow me to turn the volume up half way. I suppose that was to respect the others that were around me. And after a while of watching television… the signal was lost. I saw a familiar warning. The hotel’s cable was actually coming from Dish Network. I know this because when I lived with my sister a few years ago, she had Dish Network and it would do the same thing when a thunderstorm would pass.
But the satellite wasn’t getting any signal at all. Tired from the days before and while getting impatient, I turned off the television and just fell asleep.
Less than an hour later, I noticed that the air conditioning suddenly stopped. I sat up in bed and realized that the power went out.
I went outside and saw that it was raining and the only thing that I could assume was that the thunderstorm that was overhead knocked out the power. So I went back to the hotel lobby to verify that’s what had happened or to find out if it was just my room that was powerless.
When I opened the door, I saw a lady huddled in the corner in the darkness. The only lights on inside were the emergency flood lights in the building. She had this look on her face that she was so terrified.
The entire hotel was out of power. So I knew it wasn’t just me. And this woman behind the front desk was frantic about the situation because she couldn’t make any phone calls out to anyone, except for the use of her cell phone. But she was calling other hotels and their power was out as well and she couldn’t get through.
I remember her saying, “If we don’t get power back on soon, I will have to close down the hotel.”
I began to wonder what that meant exactly. And was it so bad that they were going to have to take all of their customers out and put them somewhere else. That thought actually crossed my mind and deep down, I hoped that it was true because a ground floor hotel room that is NOT accessible… is just ridiculous!!!
As I went back to my room to make sure that nothing was stolen since I left it wide open, the rain had stopped. The clouds were parting and I just went back and laid on the bed and went back to sleep. The hotel would have no power for 50 minutes before it came back on.
So here’s what else that I found that was so difficult with this hotel room, all of their restrictions and what not.
No smoking. No pets. No visitors. No housekeeping. No vending machines, other than ice.
Yep, that’s right. There was a card laying on the bed when I got in there that literally said. “Use our towels like you would use yours at home, over and over again.” So no fresh towels and no beds being made.
And if you were caught smoking or had pets or visitors, it was either an eviction or a very large cost to your room.
They had a list of their rules posted on the back of the door. It was crazy.
At last, I would find that behind the front desk they had candy bars and beverages that they were selling. But hell, I couldn’t see them at my altitude because the front desk was so high up that I was doing Kilroy when I got to it.
So I bought some drinks here and there. Which helped. And then Saturday morning I noticed that they had a computer set up in the lobby. I jumped on to check on my e-mail and after only a week of not being on the computer (because I was spending time with family) I had over 80 e-mails. I tried to clear some of them out but the computer wanted me to enable cookies. And I just wasn’t going to mess with it, so e-mail was going to have to wait until I got home. And when I did, I had to deal with a total of 105 messages and spam.
And then I silently signed on to Facebook. Bad decision.
12 pokes, almost 20 notifications, 5 messages in my inbox, and one friend request. A majority of the messages were regarding the woman who killed herself and they were asking if I knew about it.
I didn’t want to deal with the situation because I was still on vacation and at that point, still had a concert to see. I didn’t want to go to the concert all bummed out because of what had happened.
So I left and watched HBO, which was free. But then ended up getting yet another migraine and fever only two hours before I got picked up to go see SIX MINUTE CENTURY.
Being frustrated with having to deal with that large step up into the room, I did some investigating. I found four hotel rooms on the property that had a poured concrete ramp up to the door. But they were not in service. It even had the wheelchair symbol on the hotel room number sign.
Why wasn’t I in one of those??
When I checked out Sunday morning, I was asked how my stay was by the same woman that I had been seeing in the day time.
I LET HER HAVE IT!!
And then she replied with, “Yeah, we don’t have any accessible rooms at all.”
This after being told when I made the reservation in the first place that I would be put in one. I gave her a puzzled look and she continued with “We’re hoping to have some soon. But we don’t have any at the present time.”
So I gave it to her again. All she could do was say “Sorry”.
Sorry doesn’t cut it though.
And why is it that I found this out at the END of my stay instead of being told while I was checking in that there was nothing??
There will be some heavy duty bitching about it. Yeah, there was nothing I could do about losing the power on Friday. But going through what I went through, wasn’t all that necessary. So I’m going to do something about it, and hopefully someone will have the sense to either refund or comp my next visit to Houston.
Dambreaker 