With the reunion done, it was time for us to quickly hop over the river to Sullivan IN where we’d made reservations at the Days Inn.
Originally I’d thought about booking accommodations in Vincennes (told you’d it’d be important!) but figured that a 45 minute drive might be a bit much after a rather long day of traveling and enjoying the reunion so I managed to find a couple of rooms in Sullivan.
Or so I thought.
I should have taken the difficulty of actually finding the hotel which is stuck rather unobtrusively behind a Marathon petrol station and there was very little signage to assist us as a harbinger of what was to come.
The weird smell at the entrance should have been another glaring warning that something awful was about to happen to us.
But at this point I was rather tired and feeling a bit hypoglycaemic as I hadn’t eaten anything at the reunion. That wasn’t their fault in the slightest as they did offer some and it certainly looked delicious enough but I rarely if ever eat when I’m doing a photo shoot. I’m usually so focused on not screwing up a photo session I have no chance of ever repeating that I’m not really in the mood for food to make that nervousness far worse.
I had figured I’d find the hotel and get Mom situated and then pop across the street to get a snack to tide me over until the following morning.
So here we are in the lobby with Mom’s stuff and I’m showing them confirmed reservation from Travelocity…and the young gent behind the desk that I’m guessing is Pakistani based on the Urdu-influenced inflection in his accent says they have no record of our reservation at all.
I’m thinking that if that’s his idea of a joke, it’s in exceptionally poor taste.
But no, he’s adamant that they have no record of our reservation and he goes off to get a “manager” who comes to the desk in the form of the Pakistani equivalent of Basil Fawlty, the notoriously foul-tempered and rude fictional hotelier of “Fawlty Towers” that was brought to such delicious life by John Cleese, the supremely talented alum from the Monty Python comedy troupe.
Actually, I’m wrong about that as her incredibly bitchy attitude is very much Sybil Fawlty…maybe she’s playing both roles. She doubles down hard on the “it must be *OUR* fault” theory as her (I’m guessing) son suggests we sort it out with Travelocity.
That turned out to be rather miserable starting with it took five minutes on their wretched website to find a phone number where I might have a chance at getting an actual human being and then another five minutes navigating their even more appalling voice response unit (VRU) to find the magic sequence of numbers to get me a human being.
As I’m trying to get a human representative, the son finds our names and the reservation for the two rooms in his system and calls me by name. But apparently Travelocity didn’t send them some critical bit of information through the computer (what, I have no idea!) that they need and that’s why we’re having to deal with this.
His father (I’m guessing he’s this hotel’s equivalent of Manuel) comes out from behind the desk and the poor fellow seems afflicted by Parkinson’s as he’s holding out his phone showing our reservations in what I’m presuming is the hotel’s EMAIL account. It was rather hard to read by how much his hands were shaking and then I finally get the human representative and explain the situation.
This is the point where Travelocity showed that some of their policies are hopelessly stupid and broken.
The rep says that they’ve got to talk to the hotel to sort it out and I agree that’s a great idea because I have no clue what the hotel wants but apparently didn’t get but they’ve got enough of our reservations details to know *I* am not the one that screwed up this situation.
I tell the rep to hang on and I’ll be handing the phone to the young gent behind the plexiglass defending his check-in desk and the two of them can sort it out amongst themselves.
The rep tells me it’s some sort of idiotic policy at Travelocity that they have to ring through to the main desk even though they’re literally right in front of me and I’m going to hand my phone off with an EXISTING PHONE CONNECTION.
Nope, can’t do that and I’m involuntarily stuck on hold…and 30 seconds later the main switchboard rings and gee, who could it have possibly been on the other end of that phone? Yep, Travelocity.
At this point, I’m tired and frustrated and more than a little angry at the very rude woman who effectively accused me of being a liar even though I’d literally done nothing wrong other than apparently trying to book a stay at her hotel and causing her such inconvenience.
As this farce is playing out, Mom has rung up Meghann (who is in Mebane NC after working all day at a quilting show!) who overhears just how irritated and stressed I am and manages to do some quick searching and finds a couple of rooms are available at a hotel they’d stayed at years ago back across the river in Robinson IL.
By this point, I’ve gotten a supervisor on my phone as the other guy is still trying to work things out with the front desk people and the supervisor really has no idea why this reservation has gone completely pear-shaped but that he had a couple of rooms he could book us into over the river in Robinson IL (the same rooms Meghann had found!).
I was so over the previous thirty minutes of stupidity and rudeness and so as Mom and I are stalking out the door with her stuff (and I managed to see the glare of a painful death Mom directed at the woman “manager” as we’re passing the desk…yay Mom, I *SO* love you!), I have him go ahead and change the reservation and we’d start on the 30 minute drive back across the river.
A fair heap of the 15 miles to the Wabash was spent letting the supervisor know just how humiliated I’d been made to feel right in front of my own mother through no fault of my own and that ended up getting a $100 voucher for a future booking as compensation.
The rest of the drive to Robinson was fairly uneventful and having crossed the river, we’d gained another hour of our life back in Central time.
I was rather hoping that the new hotel check-in would be rather dull and boring so we could finally get to the rooms and conk out for the night. And indeed, it generally seemed to be so as the gent at the desk found the reservations that had been dropped on him minutes prior and we had our room keys.
This property is an older one that has no lifts and we were in the building across the street and of course we’d drawn rooms on the upper floor. But that didn’t really bother me at the time after the nightmare we’d endured across the river at the hotel we’d been forced to abandon.
So we make our way upstairs and we open up the first room with Mom getting first dibs on which one she wanted.
I’m sure you can imagine how we felt when we step into that room next to a room with at least one very loud and yappy dog in it and the first thing we see is that the bed isn’t made up and upon closer inspection there is a stain on the sheets that I have theories as to what it could be but really wasn’t interested in investigating it further. We back out of the room and see that there is rubbish in the bin filled to overflowing and a pile of used towels on the washroom floor.
Fortunately the room across the way was in much better shape so clearly that was where Mom would get to stay the night and I was off to the office to try to get the other room sorted.
The kid seemed rather surprised to see me so quickly. I hope the description above was enough because I have no intention of putting the very disgusting pictures of the mess we encountered into this post but they were certainly effective on the desk clerk who seemed mystified as to the state of the room which apparently had been marked as cleaned by housekeeping.
But then he suggests that I might want to check into the room availability at the hotel down the street.
Um…no! Not only have *YOU* already been paid for that room that was in a disgraceful state, there is no way in hell I was going to leave my mother whose safety was my primary concern on this trip in a completely different hotel!
He then magically admits that there were a couple of rooms they held in reserve and that he’d look at them to see if they’d do and I ended up in a much better room that was actually clean on the other side of the room with the yappy puppy who thankfully managed to keep it’s trap shut for the rest of the night.
One hot shower later and a bit of stretching and the night of hotelier hell was finally done and dusted and fortunately my dreams were of far more pleasant things than the previous couple of hours.
Thank goodness the reunion really rocked because everything after we left Jim’s farm really sucked (except for seeing Mom working the Hungarian grudge and evil eye for my benefit…that was truly epic!).
