Couple of Coffees

Zen and the art of hotel picking

Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. Sometimes the free WiFi turns out to be a scam or there are no hotspots on your floor. Sometimes the hotel tech help line claims the company doesn't support Safari. Whatever.

Last night, in Wichita, by far we had the worst experience of our hotel roaming summer. It started with half the hotel losing power around 7 or so. Luckily, we were on the third floor, which wasn't affected. We congratulated each other for our luck and headed out to dinner downtown.

The power was on in the whole place when we got back, which we took to be a good sign. Around 9:45, when we were both asleep due to wanting to get up and put a lot of miles under our belts today, a party started in the hall. There were slamming doors, screams and loud thuds. There were people opening drinks and talking in loud outside voices to each other. Constantly. An hour later, when Jonathan went downstairs to complain, the staff didn't offer any help or talk about quiet hours. He said the basketball team had just come back to the hotel. As it turned out, all the ruckus congregated in front of our hotel door. Whoever was next door, either the coach or some popular player, had, I'm not kidding, a knock every five seconds on the door. Jonathan counted the time for a while between silence and the slammings and knockings. The shortest count he got to was two, the longest was 62. On and on, over and over. Slam knock unintelligible screams, bang. I think it was the basketballs bouncing up and down the halls that made the banging sounds that weren't the slamming sounds.

We got up finally and I read half my new book, while he surfed the Internet. Thankfully, this hotel did have that going for it. After four hours of thinking everything was dying down, only to have another slam bam wham scream fest start up again in a few more seconds, we passed out from exhaustion.

I thought it was funny for a while, but then I got frustrated and angry, because it was so awful the staff should have stepped in, especially after complaints. Or moved us to the first floor. Yes, this whole thing was centered on our floor, not to mention the epicenter in the room next door. I moved then from anger to sadness, because these kids obviously haven't had anyone in their family to teach them to respect other people. Perhaps that's because they haven't received the respect they deserve. Or because they've never had the luxury of spending the night in a hotel.

I do feel very disappointed in the hotel management and the inability of the staff to offer anything (earplugs? more pillows?) when Jonathan complained about the situation and asked for a remedy. We're rolling out later than we expected this morning, but we'll go find a cute coffee shop downtown that roasts their own coffee and try to get this day started on a better foot. Make the most out of it. After all, we're going to need that caffeine today.

posted by Laura the Writer @ 8:59 AM