I hit the road about six days ago due to pressing family matters and I needed a place to stay for a good price. I headed to Hotwire.com for a Hot Rate deal.
The website offers a list of hotels near your destination but doesn’t tell you the name of the place until you’ve booked. The trade-off for the missing info is a great price.
Like Hotwire, I won’t disclose the name of the hotel I picked but it was in South Tacoma, Washington. Probably not the best neighborhood I thought, but why not give it a chance for forty-nine dollars a night?
I booked it for seven days. We left after one. Here are ten reasons why:
- While you’re waiting in the lobby, the conversation turns to a car prowling – committed by one of the hotel employees.
- Your son, who stayed in the car, has already turned down three drug deals by the time you get the room key.
- You have to pay your deposit in cash and don’t plan on picking it up before seven a.m.
- The hotel is next to the freeway.
- Someone across the freeway launches leftover fireworks mortars directly over the hotel: really big ones.
- Someone has taken the parking spot in front of your door leaving you with the space at the dark end of the lot.
- There are signs of a past forced entry into your room.
- You hear rap music at three in the morning and open the door to discover the source is the person who took your parking space.
- You wake up at eight to the same rap music – and a dog barking – right outside your door. The mortars are still coming.
- You meet your hotel neighbor who is the source of the barking – her dogs that is – all three of them. She tells you how she inherited one from the guy who died in the room next to yours and how that is somehow connected to the car prowling story you heard in the lobby the night before.
