Some of my readers may or may not have know that my wife's birthday was last Sunday. I wanted to do something special for her, so we made plans to spend the weekend in Baker City, Oregon. Now I don't have tons of free cash to just blow on a weekend like that, but I had a gift certificate for a weekend stay at the Geiser Grand Hotel, complete with a round of golf at one of the local golf courses.
I won this stay during a Grand Opening drawing for the new Ace Hardware store in town. This was the second prize and was valued at over $500. A night stay at hotel was a good $140 to $200, depending on the room selection.
I ask for a corner room and make arrangements to have a nice Sunday dinner complete with birthday cake. Tee times will be arranged when we get there and I manage to borrow a set of golf clubs from my boss. Things look great, even though we get a late start out on Saturday.
We roll into Baker City around 4 PM and check into the hotel. It's a historic hotel that was refurbished in the 90's. It looks like a interesting place and I don't mind so much that we were given a Parlor Room instead of the corner room. We drop of our bags and get our bearings.....hey, look. The say they have games we can borrow in the library! The library was basically a small conference room overlooking the second floor opening over the first floor dining room. The whole library was the top of a hutch with some old books. There wasn't so much as a deck of cards for "games". OK, we'll just borrow a movie from the long list of available titles kept at the front desk. Oh, that's right...the supplied TV is maybe 19" and has no VCR.....
We end up driving around a bit in the rain and catching a bite to eat at Pizza Hut. Afterwards we stop by the liquor store and the supermarket for some provisions. We head back to our room and make some plans for the morning while watching a movie on cable. The hotel wasn't able to contact the golf course so they promise to call 1st thing in the morning (since we were willing to accept an early morning tee-time). Then off to bed.....
That's were the pain begins. I've had better luck trying to sleep in an airport. The heater cycled on every half-hour or so and it was very loud. Carolyn and I couldn't talk to each other in bed using appropriate volume due to the noise. Add on top of that the fact the water pipes made a gawdaweful noise every time anyone used the bathroom, and that you could hear anyone who decided to move about......I couldn't sleep more than 20 minutes at a time. Additionally I woke up pretty much every hour on the hour (literally at X:00 AM) because (I think) they had an employee walk the floors hourly. Carolyn remembers the heater bit, but she had a rough go of it also.
I'm not what I would call a pleasant person if I've been without sleep, but I'm willing to suck it up some as it is Carolyn's birthday and all. We "sleep in" until 8 or 9 AM and then get ready to start out our day. Carolyn jumps in the shower first, as is our custom, and is unpleasantly suprised by a cold shower. The hotel's bathroom is not well lit and rather sparse. The showerhead is a good 8 feet up the wall, so Carolyn was pretty much forced to take a cold shower that she couldn't control.
That was it. She asked me if we could just go home and blow off the rest of the trip. Fine by me....heck if it was my birthday, we'd have been gone hours ago! We pack up and end up getting out of there at 10 AM. The hotel never called the golf course again so we didn't have a tee-time to cancel. As soon as we checked out we decided to do a quick walk of main street to see if we could at least check out a store or two. Sorry, but everything was closed on Sunday. WTFO?! You go to what was billed as a tourist town and it's closed on the weekend?
We did stop at a diner on the way out of town and had a good breakfast. At least something went right once....
I was told, at checkout, we still have a night's stay available and that tee-time. Hey.....some of you people I don't like....give me a call, I have a hotel room waiting for you!
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