Flashback post: The worst hotel in the world

Since we're hitting the anniversary of my absolute favorite trip ever, I'm busy writing some pretty long posts about it. But first, I have to tell you about the worst hotel in the world.

One year Nick and I met in Washington DC for a long weekend, which turned into us going to Philadelphia, which led to us almost taking a side trip to Jersey but we couldn't get to the exit fast enough. So we decided on our next trip we would actually make a road trip out of it, and in May of 2013 we both flew to Newark Airport. I took a red eye from LA, while he took the first flight out from Chicago, and we were both there by about 9 am. We had a hotel in Elizabeth, NJ, and since we were getting in early I called the hotel the day before to check on whether that was okay. They said it was no problem, and to come in when we got there. They told us a lot of things.

One of those things was that they had a shuttle that ran every hour to the hotel from the airport. So Nick and I headed out to the shuttle pickup and waited. And waited. And waited. We figured maybe we'd gotten there just after the shuttle left, but then it was over an hour. While I tried to get the number for the hotel, Nick went inside and happened to find a phone to call the hotel there, and that was how they decided to come get you. There was no hourly shuttle as advertised. We waited some more for the shuttle to finally come get us, and then we were off to the hotel, which luckily wasn't too far. But when we got there, we were told we didn't have a reservation. This was a lie. The guy at the front desk was the same one I'd spoken to on the phone the day before, and he'd found the reservation easily enough then. I showed him the confirmation email with our order, and suddenly he decided that they could get us a room but we'd have to wait because everything was booked, even though there were several buildings to this hotel and maybe three cars in the lot, total. He also refused to talk to me, instead deferring to tell Nick everything even though the reservation was under my name and I'd done literally all of the talking, which is not a good way to endear yourself to me. The guy finally said he'd see what he could do, and so we had to stand in the tiny lobby and wait with our bags. There were several old coffee stains on the linoleum floor, like no one had bothered to clean them. Everything looked tired and old, and we kept watching people head into a small closet off to the side, only to eventually realize that that was their continental breakfast. They'd set it all up on a tiny table in a closet.

Finally the guy told us (sorry, told Nick) that they had a room for us, and while they didn't have the double room we'd actually booked, they had a queen room that he insisted was bigger. While we were tempted to say screw it and get another hotel, there's an issue with booking through Priceline as we had: they already have the money, so we would have lost that and had to book another hotel last minute in an area we didn't know or try to get something in NYC which was not really going to be happening. So whatever, fine. We were planning on being in the city the whole time anyway, and it was just two nights. We'd work with this giant queen room.

If this was bigger, I don't want to know what the double room was like. The front of the room by the door was huge, but it was all wasted space. I don't even think there was a closet there. There was a queen bed, but the room was barely bigger than it, width-wise, and they'd crammed big furniture in there to make it even tighter. In order to get around the bed I had to turn sideways and scoot between it and the giant entertainment center/armoire. They had also put a table next to it, and you could only position the chair on the side of the table because there wasn't enough room between the table and bed for the chair, but if you pulled the chair out then you blocked the bathroom door. The bathroom had broken tiles, the shower wasn't completely filthy but the towels were, and even the hot and cold faucets were mixed up. As in, they were labeled wrong. You had to rent the alarm clock if you wanted to use it, the air conditioner looked dangerously balanced in the wall, there were dubious stains on both the bed and the one armchair...

"Rock, paper, scissors," Nick said. "Loser gets the bed."

It was one of those places that was so bad you could only laugh at it. Besides, we were here for New York. And this place was close to the subway!

In my defense I'd never been to this area before, and I did not realize that "close to the subway" on the hotel page meant that we had to wait for the shuttle again, and then take that back to Newark Airport, catch the train there and then take that to Penn Station. But whatever, we did it, and we had an amazing time in what became my favorite city in the world, and we didn't get back until late. Nick lost RPS that night and I got to sleep in the dodgy chair, though we traded the second night, and my god did I not want to. That thing was gross. We figured maybe housekeeping would clean when we spent a second day in the city, but "cleaning" seemed to mean "putting new stains on the bed I now had to sleep in." There had been menus slipped under the door during our first day and we'd left them because hey, it wasn't like the hotel cared what their room was like, and when we came back the next night there were more menus, but they'd been rearranged on the floor. There were also sounds during the night that we joked were probably raccoons.

After our second day we checked out and would stay in much, muuuuch better hotels along the way, and when we got back home I checked further reviews of the hotel. Everything on Priceline had been pretty positive, so I was confused as to how we ended up staying in a place so terrible. Well, I should have done more research. Yelp reviews and those on Hotels.com were not nearly as positive as Priceline. Apparently the hotel we got was usually rented out by the hour. There were a couple reviews talking about blood on the bathroom walls, spray from junkies shooting up in there and no one bothering to clean. It also looked like we lucked out and got the only room in the hotel without bed bugs. And the noises we heard at night? Totally rats in the walls!

In short: always read all the reviews, kids.

Update: I've been going through the reviews for funsies, and this place apparently closed down, and became a Days Inn. Which also closed down. Gee, I wonder why.