The Second Worse?
Catching up with our recent trip.
June 8, 2021
At the end of our first day, and after a great meal at the nearby Sonny’s BBQ, we checked into our La Quinta hotel just down the road. But things quickly went downhill.
Our first clue was that when I ask what time the free breakfast was, I was told that it was from 6am to 9am, and that it was just coffee. Nothing else.
Just coffee.
I don’t know what this is, but it’s not a luggage cart.
This is a luggage cart.
We finally ended up pretty much just carrying our luggage into the room since everything just kept falling off the ‘cart’.
And as we were doing that we encountered the First Floor Vending Area.
And the Second Floor Vending Area.
As well as the Second Floor Guest Laundry Area.
Now, in La Quinta’s defense, the room itself was very nice.
Well, mostly.
It was very cold. In fact, this cold.
So I went over to the thermostat on the wall to turn it up. But this is what I found.
Dead as a doornail. So I decided to try to turn it up at the AC unit itself. But as soon as I touched the control panel, this happened.
The entire front panel just fell off.
Looked like someone had tried the same thing I had in mind. And the control panel on the AC was dead too. So I tried to just unplug it.
But that didn’t work either, since the power plug was buried in the wall behind the unit. So we just bundled up all night.
Yeah, I know we could have probably gotten a new room, but we were tired and just didn’t want to fool with it.
And to top things off, later in the evening Jan said the TV remote had stopped working. And this was why.
The tape holding the batteries in had come off. It’s the little things, I guess.
Not what we’ve come to expect from La Quinta hotels. And though as I said, the room itself was nice, overall it would have to rate as the second worse hotel we’ve ever stayed in.
But I will have to say it’s a distant second, since the worse one, a Best Western in Pensacola, FL, had actual bullet holes in the wall, a pile of trash just swept into the corner, and the roll of toilet paper just sitting in the hole in the wall where the toilet paper roll holder should have been.
Good times!
The next morning, sans the ‘free hot breakfast’, we made a quick stop right across the street for Chicken Biscuits at Chick-fil-A before we got back on the Interstate heading for Vandalia, IL about 550 miles north.
We had planned our detour around Memphis to avoid the I-40 bridge closure and the resulting 3-5 hour backup across the I-55 bridge. But for a while it looked like even getting to Memphis, much less getting around it was kind of doubtful.
Though it was fairly sunny when we left Jackson, MS, about halfway to Memphis, the bottom dropped out. One of the those ‘the road just disappears’ bottom-droppers. So I did my usual, which was to find the brightest-lit semi trailer I could find and then keep them just in view, while hoping that they could see the road better than I could.
What really amazed me in all this was how many IDIOTS drive along in a rainstorm like this without any headlights. And with a light colored vehicle they just disappear in the storm. But after a harrowing hour or so we were finally in the clear. And though our planned detour route had a few more zigs and zags than we had figured, we arrived in Sikeston, MO for our lunch stop about 1:30.
We’ve eaten at the Lambert’s Throwed Rolls here a couple of times, so since we were passing through again, we couldn’t passed it up this time either. And it was just as delicious as always.
Jan got the Fried Chicken Dinner while I got a Veggie Plate. Then we divided it all up, and along with the pass-arounds, we were stuffed by the time we were back on the road. And with only a few more rain showers we got to Vandalia and Jan’s sister Debbie’s about 5:30pm.
Looking forward to the next days with all the family.
I mentioned that Jan brought home a new addition to her flamingo flamboyance that she got in Gulf Shores.
Good to see he’s among friends.
Thought For The Day:
“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” ― Thomas Jefferson
