Reply #17: uh oh

[iverglas]

There are lots of nice BW hotels across the country but, in my opinion, the Primrose is not one of them.

How 'bout the one on Sherbrooke in Montreal??

I usually stayed at the Tour Centre-Ville when I went to Mtl a lot on business -- converted apt building on René-Lévesque, cheap, right by the big federal buildings. But we're meeting up with a DUer from the US who'll be there on business and is staying at a big fancy hotel, and I'm not paying $300 a night, and it's just one night and all we'll be doing is sleeping, so I went for cheapest in the same area.

I have bad hotel luck. Stopped off the highway one New Year's Eve when I was just too tired to drive on, went to a big chain hotel, and we got put on the same floor as the entire first-year law class from the local university. Security finally shows up at 3 a.m. or so to politely insist that they go back in their rooms, and I hear "Hey Murray! He touched me! Hey Murray! That's an assault!" I often wished we real lawyers had shiny badges we could flash at snot-nosed law students ... . They all got 7 a.m. wake-up calls courtesy of moi ... and the hotel actually thought I was going to sign the credit card slip the next morning.

At the Chateau Frontenac for a conference, I got the room right above the front door where every five minutes, all night, someone leaned on a horn. At the Radisson in Ottawa, when my dad was waiting for neurosurgery in another city to fix the roller-coaster subdural haematoma that made the New England Journal, and had insisted on leaving hospital for the weekend, the wake-up call system went berserk and rang my room at midnight and hung up, of course prompting me to imagine long-distance calls telling me the worst. Dead tired in Alabama, I picked the same motel the local hookers used, and I've never met such thin walls.

In Las Vegas, we discovered two days in a row that housekeeping had left our door ajar the entire day -- in Las Vegas! TV didn't work (well, it worked when they went in to check it), sauna didn't work ... I gathered I was the only one in the hotel who wasn't gambling and even noticed there were TVs and saunas.

Then there was the Bond Place in Toronto (the Delta Chelsea had given my room away when I was late) ... Young Conservatives camped all over it. Partying in the halls, puking in the elevators.

But my favourite was a cheap motel in Toronto in the motel strip social services uses for housing (I now know; too tired to drive on, again) -- the family from hell in the next room; when we finally gave up on getting the manager to do anything, about 2 a.m., we knocked on the door and there they were, every light on, TV blaring, and mama, papa, son and daughter, dressed in track suits and running shoes, standing in the four corners of the room screeching at one another ... we realized we'd entered the twilight zone, and went on back to bed.

Oh well, I guess the Best Western can't be any worse!