jeriendhal | Weekend

Tracy and I had a pretty good time visiting with our friends, Elena & Jim, up in PA. Mostly we just hung out, except for a trip to a nifty model railroad museum with a 1/8 scale riding train, which Tom loved. Tracy and Elena also went out to a scrapbooking class, while I chased Tom around the house and Jim downloaded the Airwolf theme and those "Yipyipyip!" guys from Seasame Street for me to use as ringtones. I'm glad we had a good time with them, because it makes up for our hotel room, which sucked

Dear Econo Lodge in Reading, PA,

During my recent stay in your hotel, I couldn't help but observe that apparently this particular franchise's owner thought that "Econo" = "Cheap" rather than "Good Bargain." To wit:

1. The bathroom. This was quite possibly the worst hotel bathroom I'd ever seen, and that includes the non-walk in closet that I found at the Norfolk, VA Clarion. That one was just small, this one was just awful. There were hard water stains at the bottom of the tub, which was missing its stopper, preventing us from giving our son a bath, but did feature several melted and brown-stained dents from where I presume previous guests had put out their cigarettes (we'd inadvertantly reserved a non-smoking room, but that wasn't the hotel's fault). The water ranged from freezing to scalding, with no happy medium, and room was lit by a bare, uncovered bulb.

2. The bedroom. The remote for the TV, which bizarrely we were required to pay a deposit for, didn't work. The furniture could politely be described as "Distressed", with stripping coming off the drawers, an arm only partially connected with one chair, and wear marks on everything else.

3. Cleanliness. Given all that, opening a drawer to find an empty Otis Spunkmeyer cookie packet sitting next to the Gideon's Bible was just icing on the cake.