This past weekend, we visited the Twin Cities to attend the wedding of a couple of Meg's friends. We picked up our rental car at O'Hare, then loaded our luggage and took off from Highland Park around 10:00 Friday morning. We arrived in St. Paul in late afternoon, and -- on a recommendation from the Minnesota tourist-bureau welcome center -- checked into the Ramada Inn and Conference Center. Normally, you can get a pretty good night's sleep at a Ramada. Our stay, however, was sufficiently disastrous that I feel compelled to describe it. Keep in mind that all of this stuff really happened -- I'm not making it up.
We checked into the place around 4:30, made our way to the far end of the building, where our room was located, and walked down the rather dingy hallway, past some strange-looking people, to our room.
The room was dark and on the small side, with a couple of rather bumpy double beds. I took a peek in the bathroom -- the infrastructure was marginal, but for a couple of nights, I figured we'd manage.
That was when I first heard the noisy kids. I heard some commotion, like what we typically hear from our neighbors at home (the disagreeable ones, not the nice ones; and if they're reading this, they know who they are), apparently coming through the ventilation system. I wasn't delighted but didn't give it too much thought at that point.
Meg and I were hungry, after a day on the road, and we didn't much feel like getting back in the car, so we went to the restaurant in the hotel. As it turned out, there was exactly one waitress and one cook on duty -- this was on a Friday night, so as you might imagine, it took about two weeks for our dinner to arrive. To be fair, the food was pretty good, once it arrived.
We went back to our room pretty early -- maybe 8:00 or so -- figuring we'd just watch TV for awhile, then go to bed early and get a good night's sleep. Fat chance. The noisy kids, it turned out, were, in fact, in the next room, separated from ours by a paper-thin wall. I'm not sure how many kids, and how many adults, were in the room, but it seemed like a lot.
I tried to listen in, to figure out exactly what was going on next door. I guessed it was some kind of kids' soccer or baseball team or something like that -- who knows? They were running around, banging into things (mostly the wall), yelling at each other and at the adults, and generally making a racket.
Around 9:45 or so, I called the front desk. "I'm in room 172," I said, "and the group in the next room has been making a racket all evening. Can you look into it and ask them to quiet down?" "We'll get right on it," came the reply. After about 15 minutes, the commotion having continued unabated, I called the desk again. "We'll send security over," they said.
The noise got worse. At one point, some of the brats started talking about giving each other haircuts -- I heard them talking about clippers, etc. My fuzzy interpretation of the sounds I heard through the wall is that haircuts were administered; I have no idea why. In any case, shortly thereafter, a sound very similar to that of a vacuum cleaner -- might have been a hair dryer, but that would conflict with my haircut idea -- began, continued for several minutes. The general cacophony got worse as well. Kids screaming at each other, parents screaming at kids, parents and kids swearing at each other, etc.
I had a dorm room in college that had a wall as thin as this one, between my room and the next one, but that was college, so it was sort of expected. Still, there was a period during which the guys next door, as well as others on the floor, insisted on making a racket at all hours of the night. This went on for some weeks, until one morning, I went out into the hall at around 6:00 a.m., took out my trombone, and launched into an impromptu recital of Wagner excerpts. I started off with the prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, then segued into the Ride of the Valkyries, the Tannhaeuser overture, and one or two others, continuing until faces started to appear in doorways. I then lectured my neighbors about the noise they'd been making every night, explaining that my recital was just a quid pro quo.
But I digress. Back in room 172, the racket started to abate around 10:30 or so. It sounded as if most of the occupants of room 174 had left for parts unknown, and, with a sigh of relief, Meg and I were able to get to sleep -- for a short while. Around 11:00, we were awakened by -- as far as I could tell -- a couple of kids and their parents, back at it again in 174. Around midnight, I called the front desk a third time, in hopes that they'd finally do something -- again, no results. So I got half-dressed and went out to the car to fetch a couple of pairs of foam earplugs that I had along -- I'd brought them for use at Keith Code's California Superbike School, which was taking place on Monday. Anyhow, I offered Meg a pair of earplugs and put the others in my own ears. Meg doesn't really like them, but they don't bother me much, so I finally got to sleep; Meg says the hyenas in 174 eventually settled down, so she was able to nod off. Again, however, the serenity was short-lived.
At around 2:30 a.m., we got a 100-decibel wake-up call from the hotel's fire alarm, which had apparently been set off by one of the brats. The blast lasted a minute or so, before someone was able to get the thing shut off. It sounded again a minute or so later, but after that, all was quiet once more.
By this time, though, my tiny little brain was so addled that when I finally managed to get back to sleep, I started dreaming about the wretched circumstances we were in. That usually only happens with a project I've been working on for too long -- when you start dreaming about real stuff, like that, it means the demons have really taken over your mind!
However, after the fire-alarm episode, we were at least able to get some uninterrupted sleep -- which lasted until precisely 6:00 a.m., at which point Room 174's alarm clock went off -- BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP, followed by rock-and-roll radio.
Meg and I decided we'd heard enough. We grabbed our things, shoved them in the car, turned in our room key, and ran screaming out of the place. We drove around for awhile and found a better hotel -- a Hampton Inn, which has become our favorite lodging chain recently -- and checked in around 9:30, thankful that the place would let us in at that early hour.
I'm not sure there's a moral to this story, because I've spent many a night in a cheap motel, without being subjected to the noise and disruption we ran into at the Ramada. You'd think such a prominent chain would send someone out to each of its franchisees every so often, to make sure everything was ship-shape -- but I guess you'd be wrong.
Copyright © 1998 John J. Kafalas