I always take expensive stuff with me except my suitcase during the day
And you can be sure that whoever cleaned the room browsed the suitcase to make sure the expensive stuff wasn't there.
Went to get a room at a Super 8 in Topeka one time.?ÿ It seems about six of us showed up all at once and there was only a single desk clerk attempting to keep us all happy.?ÿ Overheard the nice young lady ahead of me say she had driven in from Wyoming and was so tired she could sleep in the little lobby if there was no room available.?ÿ She got her room card/key and headed off.?ÿ I was next.?ÿ Things went fine.?ÿ I got my room card/key and headed off.?ÿ Opened the door and shocked the living daylights out of the nice young lady who had been ahead of me in line.
Left my baggage in the hallway and went back down to get a different room assignment.?ÿ That poor gal probably slept with one eye open all night.
Not as titillating as some of the above stories, but while working on a 5 man BLM crew in north Idaho we knew we'd need a month to complete a project so rented a furnished apartment to save some dough.?ÿ The price was quite reasonable and it was 2nd story above commercial businesses with access from the alley.?ÿ We learned why it was so cheap the first night when we discovered it was above a bowling alley which didn't close until 11:00pm, except Sundays.
I'm surprised they could keep the apartment available.?ÿ Many times the business below will lose money and close.?ÿ Similar to the situation where that upstairs apartment was made into a bordello.?ÿ The business fails because it has too much f^^^^ng overhead.
Once on an our-of-town road job we encountered a trash pile.?ÿ It was evident the debris was from someone that cleaned a residence out hastily.?ÿ One of the guys noticed a HUGE brassier in the pile.?ÿ This thing must have been six feet long and could easily hold two bowling balls.?ÿ Somehow it wound up in the back of the truck.
The details were as sketchy as the perpetrators, but it made it into a load of laundry at the hotel and hung over the door of one of the hotel rooms for a night or two.?ÿ I Don't remember seeing it after that and assumed someone had finally tossed it in the trash.
We all got home Friday evening late.?ÿ The next morning at about 8AM my phone was ringing off the wall.?ÿ It was the youngest member of our crew Larry Gene.?ÿ Larry Gene's wife was ballistic in the background.?ÿ He wanted me to talk to her since I was the boss.?ÿ I tried...
Someone had apparently put the bra in Larry Gene's dirty laundry.?ÿ His wife dumped it out Saturday morning for wash.?ÿ A fragile marriage less than a year old hung in the balance of my ability to convince her Larry had been the butt of a cruel joke.?ÿ I was semi-successful.
There were three other guys that could have been the culprit.?ÿ Larry's wife eventually called each and every one of them.?ÿ Good thing she got the same story from everybody...with one glitch...everybody blamed somebody else and nobody admitted to the crime.
My only suggestion to Larry was to go through his dirty laundry before he turned it over to his wife next time.?ÿ 😉
@holy-cow our favorite place in Fort Bragg, California was the Best Western but the owner made it clear our reimbursement rate is only about 65% of what he could easily get for the rooms.?ÿ So I tried calling around which only yielded flea bags.?ÿ Complained to my boss about the low reimbursement rates.?ÿ Found out about the State Travel Store which has a website.?ÿ Went there and they somehow scare up decent rooms for the reimbursement rate.
The hotel in Fort Bragg is a Super 8, the owner is very happy to have our business and he runs it very well for a Super 8.?ÿ Rooms are tiny but all brand new inside and very clean.
We made him even happier when we figured out how to turn off his old faithful gaiser sprinkler (Fort Bragg is in stage 4 water emergency).?ÿ Finally found the valve, typical irrigation system pasted together over the decades.
Local cop drove up but he wasn't much help.
@jitterboogie LOL!?ÿ I haven't seen a jar of pickled eggs in years.?ÿ I can remember going places with my father and him stopping at certain bars for a beer?ÿ every one of those places had a jar of pickled eggs and a jar of pickled pigs feet on the bar back in the late 60's through the 70's.
Who in their right mind would eat a pig's foot, pickled or otherwise?
Back about 1994 shortly after I stated with the State I was loaned from the office to field. Not long before, the per diem had changed from a flat amount each day for meals, lodging, incidentals, to only meals and incidentals plus up to a certain amount for lodging per night (something like $72 a night back then). The party chief I was assigned to had spent 30 years on the road under the old rules, where two crews would find the cheapest room they could get and sleep on the floors, whatever, and pocket the per diem savings. Even though the rules changed, he still stayed in low end motels.?ÿ
Not knowing any better, I stayed where he stayed (own room though) but the other crew member went to a much nicer place and negotiated as good of a room as he could get for the $72 rate. This particular week he got the bridal suite.
The old PC wasn't keen on data collectors or laptops (he ran rod all day) so when we got back to the rooms each day we had to go download the data collector and check our work (doing topo for a pipeline). So, we headed to the bridal suite where the laptop was set-up. We downloaded and checked, then started to head back to the PC. As we approached the door, I stopped and said "we ARE NOT walking out of the bridal suite together. I'll go, then you come out in about 5 minutes."
A couple of years later I was running a crew. We stayed at a nasty motel in a small town along I-5 the first night. Got up the next morning and when I went out I saw my crew members carrying their duffle bags and such down to the trucks. I asked what they were doing and they said "this place is a dump. We are going to another town (about 30 miles away) where they have nice rooms for the State rate." I told them I didn't care as long as they met me at the job site at starting time each morning. I thought I had a mutiny on my hands.
We were up late playing poker at an out of town motel. We heard what we thought were fireworks going of. Looked out the window to see a Thunderbird with all the windows shot out in the ditch behind our motel. Pretty so the Sheriff and his Deputy pulled up behind the Thunderbird. They came up to the car and the Deputy hollars "He's playing possum." He opens the car door an a young guy jumps out and pushes the Deputy out of the way and starts running toward our open window. The Deputy empties his revolver as the kid is running away. The Sheriff steps around the car and shoots the kid twice in the back with a shotgun. The kid falls like a well hit pheasant 20 feet in front of us. Bugs a North Dakota kid on our crew loses it and starts screaming "Murderers, senseless murder. Pretty soon a station wagon shows up and they throw the kids body in the back of it like a sack of potatoes.
We wake the PC to tell him what just happened. He replied "was it one of us?" No we replied. He said will go back to bed. Needless to say we didn't get much sleep that night.
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I was doing a series of surveys in California, and found a nice motel just a block from the site in Laguna Beach. When I called to make a reservation they assured me none was needed. When we checked in it was a very nice place, safe area, and reasonable rates, especially for that area. That puzzled me until we were carrying equipment inside and I heard the roar. We were right under the glide path for a naval station and that F-18 Hornet could not have been 200 feet over us. I could see the pilot clearly.
Decades ago in my first college experience at the University of Florida they had an option for a two-room suite for a dollar a month more, obviously a bargain. Even better nobody else signed on for the extra buck so I had a suite all to myself. It was Sledd Hall, old but nice.
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That's my kind of motel.?ÿ No need getting shot too close to home.
"at an out of town motel"
This particular week he got the bridal suite...?ÿ
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I got to stay in a "bridal suite" in a converted 60' single wide in Middlesgate Nevada off Hwy 50 east of Fallon NAS and was served by Genny power only for everything, well, electric everything.
We were slogging mag gear for a 10 hour day and it was snowing, mud stuck to our boots and added an exter 10 lbs to each leg.
After surviving the day in the field I almost didnt notice the stale cigarette smoke stench,?ÿ perfume and BO and makeup on the sheets and pillows, and the cat urine carpet air freshener.
Needless to say, I requested a new set of sheets and linens and other wise after a horrendous start, and only a few days where the water was out due to a diesel fuel pump failure, it was pretty ok for the time.
Across the Hwy 50 was an ancient shoe tree that had been used for at least 50 or 60 years the owner told me(his age minus a few years).
A few years ago I had a chance to cruise back along hwy 50 and noticed it was gone. A sad day indeed as it was a long time sentinel along the lonliest road In America, between Fallon and Austin, and a time mark to let you know how much further that hypnotizing road would take to get to Eureka, and beyond.
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When I was a wee lad I spent the night with my parents at an old hotel in Northwest Arkansas.?ÿ THE bathroom for the floor was halfway down the hallway.?ÿ This was long before Walmart and other major changes to that region.
I'll bet y'all were happy Taco Bell hadn't been invented yet. ?????ÿ
@flga-2-2?ÿ
I am pretty sure this is the one in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.?ÿ Eight floors and they all were considered ground floors.?ÿ I remember looking out the rear window at all the metal work.
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/arkansas/basin-park-ar-hotel/
It was old mostly dead cottonwood along an intermittent stream or irrigation ditch that people had been tying their shoes together and throwing up for n the branches. Additionally they had been nailing them to the nearly 5ft diameter trunk too.
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I've seen a few of these across the rural western US.
Anyone who has too start a thread....
February of 2008, I was working for a large firm based out of Helena, Montana. Our office was slow, and the Phoenix office was booming. Myself as PC and another guy as my I-man got shipped to Phoenix for 6 weeks. My boss at the time lectured me endlessly about making sure that the truck and equipment both got secured at all times and that nothing got stolen.
After driving from Helena, MT to Phoenix, I met with the survey department manager around 4pm on a Sunday. We discussed the projects I'd be working on for a while. He then told us that he had made us reservations in a hotel about half a mile from the office that had a Denny's right next door. We proceed to the hotel, where I secure a ground floor room and my I-man secures a room on the 9th floor. During check in, I ask the desk clerk 3 different times if there was any issues with parking in any portion of the parking lot. He assured me that there was not.
We both grabbed a bite to eat, packed all the equipment into my room, and hit the hay for the night.
The next morning, when I awake at 530 am, I walk over to the window to glance out and check the weather, and do a double take. Our work truck was NO WHERE in sight! I run out to the parking lot in my boxers to verify that the truck is not there. The spot that I had backed the truck into had 2 skid marks about 18" long. No other sign of the truck.
I go back to the room and call the I-man, demanding to know if he had gone out the evening before. He swore he had not. I call the front desk and ask if they had security footage of the lot. Then I get dressed and go the front desk. The kid working was useless and could not tell me anything. I then walk over to the Denny's to ask them if they had security footage. The night manager then proceeds to tell me that his food truck delivery was unable to back up to their door in the middle of the night, so even though I had parked in a LEGAL spot, he had my truck towed. To say I was livid was putting it mildly. I asked him if he had called the front desk to inquire about having the owner of the vehicle with Montana tags woken up so that the truck could be moved. He said that he had called, but the kid at the front desk didn't know who's truck it was.
After 3 hours of phone calls between my office, the hotel, and Denny's, we were finally able to track down the towing company. They charged us $1800.00 for the impound fee and tow. Our corporate office immediately pulled us from the hotel and put us up in an apartment complex in a gated community. To my knowledge, our company was never able to recover the towing/impound fees, nor did they ever do business with either chain again. My only saving grace was that I had secured all of the equipment. Even with that though, I got razzed endlessly for having the truck "stolen" the first night in the big city.