Another Hotel Adventure

We just got back from New Orleans. My husband did some consulting there and we decided to take a few days to see a city that was new to us.

Our hotel was part of a national chain, although a brand we’d never seen before. It advertised itself as fun and creative. And not wasting space. An interesting combination.

I opened the door and stepped in, nearly colliding with the bed. There was room to walk around it. But not much. Then, after hauling the luggage in, we looked around and laughed.

As you can see, part of the wall facing the bed is painted to look rustic, a barn perhaps. There are big wooden pegs mounted high on the wall and wooden hangers with leather loops instead of hooks. Look carefully and you’ll see that if you actually hung your clothes on these pegs, the tv would be covered.

You can also see a folding chair and something else hanging from the pegs. The chair made it possible to sit at a fifteen-inch round bistro table, which isn’t big enough to be very useful. The other thing unfolded into something like a camp chair, but it wasn’t sturdy enough to sit on. We finally decided that you were supposed to sit on the bed and put your computer on it. Awkward, but that was our best guess.

My husband is a frequent visitor of this hotel chain, so we weren’t surprised when he got a text saying that our room had been upgraded … to two rooms. Gee thanks. We’d been sleeping in separate beds since his back surgery, and we’d been looking forward to at least sleeping in the same room on this trip. Anyway, the second bedroom, past the bathroom, was arranged differently so that we could hang our clothes and keep up with the news.

Keeping with their promise to save space, there was almost no furniture. There were two beds with two small end tables, but no dressers or shelves, and no flat place to put the suitcase so you could “live out of it.” No chair to relax in—neither one of us thought the string chair looked comfortable and neither one of us wanted to risk getting stuck in it.

I never figured out where the fun was. The creativity was obviously our part—figuring out to live there for ten days.

I’ve saved the oddest thing for last. The bathroom had a square toilet. Now I looked this up and it seems to be a new trend because many people feel it’s more comfortable. I find that hard to believe. Even after a week, I still felt like a two-year-old balancing on the edge of the big people’s potty.

Every time I went in there, especially when I got up at night, I was chanting to myself, “Don’t fall in. Don’t fall in. Don’t fall in.”