WHO DOESN’T LOVE A HOTEL WITH A WATER FEATURE?

 

Hey Howdy, Gang!  I hope everyone is doing absolutely outstanding, that you are moving fast, getting’ shi… er… stuff done, and are ready for the upcoming holidays.  I can’t wait! Even though I’m totally not ready. 

Oh well, it will come whether I’m ready or not.  But I do have my tree up.  😊  I’m smiling because anyone who knows me well knows that my tree stays up all year.  Why?  Because I ADORE Christmas and because I absolutely detest rework.  LOL  But I do see that my sweet angel is leaning just a bit.  I’ll have to get a broom and bump her back into position.  

Okay, first let me apologize for being MIA.  I have been working a big Kickstarter project for the Butterscotch Martini Girls (as you probably already know).  And I now know why they named the platform Kickstarter…because it started kicking my you-know-what on Day 1!  So when I survived it, one of the first things I did was grab my buddy Dani Petrone and we headed up to Flagstaff to do a little resting, eating, drinking, brainstorming…and then more of the same. 

…And this is where things really went off the rails.  We checked into a hotel I have stayed in many times before, but I haven’t been there since COVID.  Well, just like some people I know, the hotel didn’t fare all that well through the pandemic.  In fact, our first clue that something might be amiss was when we pulled into the parking lot and noticed it looked like the place hadn’t been raked, trimmed, or cleaned up in a couple of months. Not a good start.  Sigh. 

Hmmm…maybe they don’t have any rakes, trimmers, or mowers. 

Lobby seemed fine, as it was decorated nicely with a warm and welcoming fire in the fireplace. Oh-kay, no reason to panic. Then we checked in and parked around back to be near the outside entrance that was closest to our room. Hmmm…back parking lot TOTALLY empty…and I mean TOTALLY.  I’ve never experienced that at this hotel before. 

I’m starting to itch. 

So, we park close to the entrance, which happens to be next to the dumpster. Okay, I left a couple of empty spaces between me and the trash, then we unload a couple of suitcases and head inside. Clue Number TWO came when we got inside, took the elevator up to the third floor, exited and rounded the corner to find two refrigerators sitting randomly in the little lounge area and a mop bucket sitting right in the middle of the hallway. It was impossible to tell if there was mopping in progress or a leak in the roof, so we crossed our fingers and continued down the hallway. 

The itching is escalating. 

We find our room easily, unlock the door and enter through the gates of HELL…and the fires of hell must be blazing because our room is H.O.T!!!  Like probably 82 degrees and the fan is a crankin’.  OMG, I immediately start searching for the thermostat as I am stripping.  Of course, again…anyone who knows me knows I live in arctic temperatures.  I cannot stand to be hot, and I’m about to spontaneously combust.  Hell, even Dani is hot—so you know it was toasty. 

After much searching on my part, Dani finally points out to me that the thermostat is right in front of me on the wall.  Okay, I get a little discombobulated when I’m hot…my brain starts to overheat at about 75 degrees.  So I immediately go to work on the thermostat, I reset the temperature to 67, make sure the fan is set to on, and I dash out the door to get more suitcases and cool off in the chilly Flagstaff outdoors. 

Now the itching is turning into hives  AND I’m sweating like a whore on nickel night! 

So, I dodge the bucket, go around the refrigerators, and exit the building to see a young man headed straight for my truck.  He spots me step out the door and immediately changes directions, makes a big loop through the parking lot and comes back by, after having gone nowhere. He acts like he is going to duck inside the fence around the dumpsters until he sees me watching him, then he heads on around the building, back the way he came. 

I resist the urge to bang my head against the door of my truck. 

Then I grab the last of the bags and drag them upstairs, around the fridges and the bucket I’m starting to think of as a water feature. Dropping them in the room, I hustle Dani out so we can grab some dinner while the damn room cools off. On our way out of the parking lot, we notice a line of people walking through the parking lot.  WTH?  We look around and discover that the parking lot is actually a shortcut between an apartment building and the bus stop which is right in front of the hotel.  Great! 

We had an absolutely lovely dinner, then headed back to the room a couple of hours later, full of steak and margaritas, and fortified with leftovers. It was delicious! Back at the hotel, we decided to park in the front lot, at the opposite end of the hotel from the bus stop. Less busy. The fridges are still camped in the lounge, the water feature is still right where we saw it last, and the room is still hotter than nine kinds of hell.  Not a damn thing has changed.  So now we try to get the windows open. 

Well, I guess the hotel has a lot of jumpers (probably shouldn’t have been a surprise) because we can’t get the windows open. Then I notice the screens on the outside of the windows have big holes in them, edges of the holes shredded and flapping in the wind. Guess those jumpers didn’t think to remove the screens before leaping. 

Now I’m hyperventilating. 

I call the front desk, making it clear to them that it is MUCH too hot in our room and someone needs to fix it. They sweetly apologize, but say they can’t do anything because the entire hotel is switched to heat.  I said, “Then at least make it go off.” 

She sweetly repled, “Oh, you can do that right at the thermostat…just turn it to a cooler setting and it will shut off.” 

Uh…no, it won’t.  I not so sweetly explain that we set the thermostat to 67 about 3 hours ago and it hasn’t cooled off a one single degree. 

She then sweetly says, “You can open a window and that should cool it off quickly.” 

I replied, “We tried. We can’t get the windows open, and the screens have holes big enough to throw a body through them. God only knows what will fly in if we ever manage to get them open."  (Probably a hungry herd of Pterodactyls.) 

Silence for a minute as she processes my comment. Then she offers to send maintenance up. 

Excellent! 

So…the maintenance guy has some difficulty understanding me because English isn’t his first language and, let’s be honest, I don’t really speak mainstream English—and certainly not when I’m itching, sweating, hyperventilating, and generally about to explode. 

But we finally get our point across, and this sweetheart of a man climbs up into the ceiling and fiddles with something up there that blessedly shuts the heat off. Then we manage to crack the windows—which is all we can do because we are on the third floor and…well…jumpers. 

So we change into our jammies and I sit my happy arse right in front of the cracked window with the flapping screen, waiting for it to cool enough for me to sleep.  Neither Dani nor I slept well that night because it remained just too warm. By the next day, it had improved enough that we no longer considered packing our stuff out to another hotel. By the second night, it was nice and chilly, and by the next morning, we really didn’t want to get out of bed because it was cold. But having complained about it being hot, we didn’t really feel we could now complain that we were cold.  LOL  So, we closed the window and went down to breakfast. 

The only other issue we had was on the 2^nd day, we spotted a large wet spot in the elevator where someone had spilled something bringing their breakfast back to their room.  We told the front desk they needed to have housekeeping clean the floor in the elevator before someone slipped in the mess.  Later that day, we saw someone had put a neon green stickie on the floor next to the mess…probably to help housekeeping find the big messy spill. That evening when we came back in, we saw that someone (probably housekeeping) had cleaned up the green stickie. 

But apparently, they don’t have mops at this hotel either because the spilled mess remained. 

The saving grace was that the hotel had a happy hour every night and a couple of good bartenders…vacation saved!  Twice the front desk apologized to us for the condition of the hotel, indicating they were preparing to undergo a large renovation. About 5 years too late, if you ask me…but better late than never. Would I go back to that hotel again?  Probably not until after that “large renovation”…but then there is the free booze. Hmmm…guess we now know why the bar is right inside the front door and why the happy hour was free.  They want to stop you before you get out the door. 

There’s a lot to be said for free booze! 

Well, that’s my story, torrid and toasty, and I’m stickin’ to it. Hang on tight now ‘cuz we’re gonna go real, real fast!

Love ya, and I hope each and every one of you has a MERRY CHRISTMAS!    Hugs,

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