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 Here’s
the deal. You sit down one night and think of a nice place for you and your
spouse to spend the weekend. You call ahead, reserve a room…are told that
everything is fine and ready for you to arrive. When you get there it’s
nothing like you had in mind and is a disaster in the making. To all of those
who have had this happen to them, please hold up your hands…. Yes, just as I
thought, nearly everyone. Item in discussion. This past weekend. I decide to be
a generous, gracious, loving kind of guy. I like small hotels. Not the big
mega-resorts, but smaller friendly places that seem kind of out of the way and
easier to get around in. We’ve stayed in a lot of these and have been happy. I
call up this hotel on the ocean not so far away and make reservations. Now, I am
very specific…"Can we have a room with a view?" No problem I am
told. Can we get a room at the end of the hall with a view…? We can’t
promise, but we’ll certainly do our best…and oh yes, don’t forget we have
a very large buffet each morning…. So, we drive about 200 miles and what do we
get? You got it…a room with a view…of the roof of some building. Nice view
of about 5 air conditioning units. Some old soft drink cans. Lots of wire. Maybe
one or two assorted pieces of trash. Could you see the water? Well, in all
honesty, if you stood on the window and looked really hard off to the left you
could. Of course, this can be traced to my being stupid, since I did ask for a
room with a view. I suppose the case can be made that any room with a window has
a view of some sort. I just think a view is something other than machinery, but
then maybe some folks like to look at big pieces of stuff on the roof. How do I
know? Welcome to the hotel from Hell. So much for what they promise over the
phone. Now, you can’t really get mad at the clerk at the front desk. He’s
just trying to earn a living and he didn’t promise to give you anything. On
the other hand he won’t help you get anything either. He just has his rules
and his policies and has to do what someone told him to do. This of course
includes not moving anyone from some room to another. I’m certain this is a
major violation of some sort. Besides, as he says…he just follows orders. I
think this is the same training program Hitler used back in the 40’s, wasn’t
it? Speaking of Hitler, would he have been as effective if his first name had
been something like …"Skippy" or "Bubba"? Probably not.
Anyway, back to the hotel. So, we end up in this room with no view. Too late in
the evening to think about changing hotels. We’ll just grin and bear it. Now,
you’d think that even in some small hotel….you would see some other guests.
Not here, we get the feeling we are the only ones there. Nobody slams any doors,
no footsteps in the hall. No ice chunking from the ice machine. Really spooky
and strange. We manage to barricade the door so that some serial killer can’t
get in during the night and murder us in our beds. We finally drift off to sleep
with the half way happy thought that at least we’ll have the huge buffet in
the morning. Now, you could stop right here, couldn’t you since you know how
this is going to end? The next morning I get up, get shaved and showered, get my
clothes on and bounce down to the lobby. They have at total of 6 muffins of
unknown composition, 1 small box of cereal, no milk and 1 pot of coffee and
several tea bags, but no hot water. This is huge? This is wonderful? This is
dumb, is what this is…..I settle for two cups of coffee and a couple of the
muffins. It brought back memories of my Grandmother. Notice that I didn’t
say…’fond memories’…just memories. The coffee was about the same kind
she used after the war. As I recall it was made from old sawdust and some kind
of weed. Tasted the same to me. The mystery muffins were made of some fiber that
defied our investigation. We had never seen or tasted anything like them before
in our collective years. Once you swallowed a piece it just swelled up like a
sponge in your throat and stuck there. Took forever to get it down. You had to
drink more coffee (joy) or lots more water, which seemed to increase the
expansion rate of the major muffin component. These could be dangerous to some
elderly people. I think there should be a warning label for muffins in this
place. In fact I need to write them a letter and suggest a warning for the whole
establishment. "DON’T STAY HERE." seems appropriate. Send comments
to www.pearyperry.com. Send your nasty complaints to me @ A.
Hitler, LaPaz, Bolivia. He’ll handle these for me.
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