A bit of heaven, a bit of hell

Tess likes to observe that the bigger the room rate, the fewer things you get for free. Which is one reason we ended up at the The Latham Hotel in Philadelphia's Center City. We got a great rate (about $130 a night), free Internet and every amenity that matters. Also, the maid service was the best I've seen anywhere. We'd leave the room at 8 or 9 each morning, and it was invariably made up by the time we'd wander back around lunchtime. I hate coming back to an unmade bed, because you just know that the maids will come knocking soon -- but there's no telling when.

This is a boutique hotel, with a small lobby and small staff who do not hover around smirking at your shoes and waiting for tips. It's clean, it's quiet and it's tastefully appointed. It's also within walking distance of all the city's sights. No need to pay for a cab. Comparing it to similar places I've stayed in New York, it's definitely a bargain. Highly recommended.

Not recommended: the Atlanta airport at 1 a.m., after a lot of flights have been canceled and all standby seats have been claimed by those less deserving. You stand there unshaven and sweating and try to come to grips with your choices: ride out the night in Concourse D with floor waxers shrieking by like taxiing 747s, or stampede to the exits with the other maddened beasts and try to find shelter in the urban jungle of greater Atlanta.

Option B, assuming you raise somebody on one of the sticky courtesy phones and extract from them a vague promise of accommodation, isn't for the timid. Outside where the hotel shuttle buses come by, everyone's clamoring for one of the Titanic's few lifeboats, reaching for the skid on the last helicopter out of Saigon. All pretense of courtesy vanishes; people are grasping and cursing and shoving their overstuffed bags into a van that in all likelihood is not the one they want.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with naked self interest and a desperate battle to get aboard the last bus to the Sleep Inn. It's not unlike one of those Heironymous Bosch paintings, except the airport people are mostly fatter, and, thankfully, fully clothed. My next trip will be by car.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine
Read more

That ship has sunk

Image
After a long career in journalism, I'm back in the job market. For a limited time only. All I require are a company car, a five-figure signing bonus and a six-figure salary. If somebody could swing by and clean the house once a week, that would be great too. Until then, guess who's going to be blogging like there's no tomorrow. I've worked at various newspapers for the better part of three decades. I've been a reporter and an editor and there was a time in the mid '90s when I thought I was being very clever by learning HTML. I was thinking: Job security, baby; every newspaper will be on the Internet in a few years. I was right about the last part. But it turns out most people eventually questioned the wisdom of paying for what they could get free. Who knew? Then circulation and ad revenue headed south, and corporate boards figured they could maintain profits by shrinking the product and letting people go. Now circulation and ad revenue are Thelma and Louise: st
Read more

Back to the keyboard -- but it's a new one

Image
After a writing hiatus of quite a few months longer than I intended, I'm back to work on what I will refer to as "the book." I knocked out another 500 words yesterday, and expect to make that the standard day's output. But since I've had these productive impulses before, and since they tend to expire after about a week, I'm employing a few other strategies. First: A new computer! Yep, I have decided that there are too many games on my desktop machine, it's too noisy, and it confines me to one room of the house. So I ordered a new notebook computer from Dell. It's their new 1420 model. Should be here in a couple more weeks -- although you never know with Dell -- and then the only files I'll transfer from my old computer to the new one are my in-progress writing projects. I know what you're thinking: Basically, I'm offering myself a cheap bribe to a commit to a project that will probably take a year -- long after the shiny new computer cease
Read more