Alicia, Winnie and I recently returned from Chicago, for spring break. The intent of the trip was to go apratment hunting for Winnie, but that didn’t really happen. Instead we did a little shopping, a lot of eating, and watched the St. Patrick’s parade. We saw some lovely architecture; the likes of which I haven’t seen since moving to Indiana.
We also enjoyed watching the city dye the river green. It’s somewhat interesting to watcha river be dyed a different color. The one thing I never did understand, is why they do this for St. Patrick’s day. The best I came up with is from the
History Channel. It just seems like a rather odd tradition. More importantly, why don’t we dye rivers other colors for other occasions? Red for St. Valentine perhaps. I’m sure it would creep people out, especially if you did it to the Mississippi River, but soon they would embrace the tradition.
The only dissappointing part of our trip was our hotel. Holiday Inn in Elk Grove. This was by far the worst hotel experience I have ever had. First the hotel was under rennovations. This was the least of our concerns, though the ripped up carpet, exposed concrete, missing room numbers, paint fumes, and circuitous route to our room through the pool was slightly annoying.
Second, we chose a hotel by O’Hare in order to get a shuttle to the CTA, and train ino the city. The Holiday Inn, apparently, is the only hotel in the O’Hare area that doesn’t pick up after 11:00 pm. When we arrive at 1:00 am and called the hotel, we were simply told we had to call a taxi. They neither offered to do this for us, not did they give an any numbers or recommendations for taxis when we asked.
As for the room, we asked for a non-smoking room, since smoke gives Alicia migraines, and generally doesn’t agree with me either. Our room was definitely a smoking room not very long ago. We were also on the first floor, and didn’t have curtains. There were very sheer linens over the windows, which you could easily see through, and heavier, room darkening curtains, though we couldn’t close those. The heavier curtains were on separate bars, about two-feet long on either side on the windows, and bent with pliers to prevent the hooks and curtains from falling off entirely. This made the room very bright, and extremely annoying.
The last extremely annoying with about our truly horrible stay at Holiday Inn, was our “Complimentary, Cooked-To-Order Breakfast”.
Why was this annoying? It didn’t exist. They had a buffet, which was $7.95 each.
