For this third section about the trip, I suppose I should discuss...
The Hotel:
I was looking for a hotel where we could stay weeks (months?) before the trip. I had seen a (it turned out to be--who knew?) good deal at the Hotel Monteleone (home of the Carousel Bar), but I waited another day hoping for a price drop---and it soared upwards, never to come down again. Looking for a place near the French Quarter, especially since I was not planning on renting a car (and indeed, we did not need one), I found the most reasonable thing I could find, the Wyndham Garden...which was still crazy expensive!
The hotel looked like it might be nice. The photos showed an open floor plan where you could see down into the lobby from any floor, and there were these cool silver orbs dressing the place up and adding, at first glance anyway, a sort of chic element to it. Appearances can be deceiving...
Our room was basic. It was also located right next to the elevators and right behind the vending and ice machines. Swell. The machines weren't so bad, but the elevators--geez! You could hear people coming and going all night long...and their conversations (people didn't seem to realize they could be heard beyond the paper-thin walls). The hotel is in a space that used to house an old Sears (?) department store. The only windows in the rooms looked out into the hall--NOT outside. Basically it's a fire trap. Groovy...Something else to worry about while I'm not sleeping, thanks to the elevator noises...
There was a wanna be 50's diner attached to the lobby, the City Diner, which we did have breakfast at one time.
However,diner or no diner, the elevator situation was awful. The 4th night there was there worst. We finally complained (and learned there had been a fraternity party in the hotel---ugh!) and they moved us to a different room. It was a nicer room,I guess--but incredibly long and narrow. There was a sitting room, then the bedroom for the beds, connected to a long narrow bathroom with a shower and a separate bathtub. And we were away from the elevators. The only window looked out into the hall, of course. It was another fire trap. All of the rooms seemed to be. Yikes!
But almost from the first moment in the new room,something seemed a bit wrong. Erich had gone to the bathroom, which was a clear on the other side of the long narrow bathroom. I thought I could smell it all of the way over by the door to the hall---but no where else in between was stinky. WEIRD.
The day after we moved into the new room, we were walking back from somewhere and I stopped to get some souvenir or postcard or SOMETHING. I don't remember what. Erich went on ahead. When I got to the hotel finally, lights were flashing and an alarm was sounding. The hotel was being evacuated--no one was being allowed in. I looked around on the side walk. Where was Erich? People were milling about and the staff was getting the last stragglers out of the building...but where was Erich? Where was Erich? Finally they declared it a false alarm and we all got to go back in. I raced up to the room and went in. He wasn't in the sitting room or on his bed. Hmm. "Erich?" "I'm in the bathroom!" Ha! Erich had ridden out the false alarm "fire" on the toilet. Too funny. But at the same time, I could smell it--or something--from the front of the room, by the door. Not so much by the bathroom.Strange...
After three nights in that room, it was time to leave. Every once in a while I could hear people talking in the hall as they passed by the room. Something was definitely going on and that stinky bathroom smell could be detected in the living room area by the door again. Very bizarre. As we headed down to the lobby, it became apparent why. A pipe had burst in room across the hall from us and up a floor. It had slowly been leaking raw sewage down through the next room below and finally down through that floor, before running down one of the high,overhead light fixtures and raining down into the lobby. So THAT is what we had been smelling by the front door to our room those three days. GROSS! Anyway, as we were leaving, there was a bucket collecting the raining filth with caution cones around it. What a SH...er, CRAPPY hotel. LITERALLY, Ha!
More to come...the ill-fated swamp tour! The birthday dinner fiasco! A ghost tour! Visits to cemeteries! A homeless man we adopted! And MORE!!! Stay tuned.
CHEERS!
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