2022, Family, Travel, Uncategorized

The Everclear Inn

23 Comments

We have a small airport in our town that has flights to Denver in rather small planes. It works pretty well as long as your final destination is somewhere in the West or Southwest. If you are flying East, it makes more sense to drive to Bismarck and take a plane to Minneapolis and then to where you need to end up.

Since Bismarck is in the Central Time Zone and we are in Mountain Time, getting to the airport two hours before an 8:00 flight means leaving our town at 3:30 am. We choose to spend the night in Bismarck instead of having such an early flight. The traveler’s choice is usually a hotel in South Bismarck that offers free shuttle service to the airport and lets you leave your vehicle in their parking lot.

This hotel used to be called The Expressway Inn. It recently has been given new management and a new name, and is deteriorating rapidly in terms of service and cleanliness. We stayed there Wednesday night. Husband dubbed it The Everclear Inn in a play on its new name. I noticed in the elevator a sign extolling their modern hygiene practices, such as “electrostatic room cleaning”, whatever that might mean. It is just too bad it is the closest hotel to the airport. It is still probably better than driving to Bismarck in the middle of the night. We flew back into Bismarck late Sunday night. The Weather Service prediction of heavy snow and ice over the weekend made it prudent to spend the night and drive home on Monday morning. Husband insisted on the Hampton Inn, a step up from our usual. I will be glad to be home.

What have been your more interesting lodging experiences? Come up with some interesting scenarios for electrostatic cleaning. How do you manage airports these days?

23 thoughts on “The Everclear Inn”

  1. What have been your more interesting lodging experiences?
    In the late 90s, just needing a night out of Kaohsiung, we packed up the kids and went to a faded resort next to a reservoir in the next county over. ChiaYi Farm had developed around the community built for the retired soldiers who had followed Chiang Kai-shek from China in 1949. By the 90s it was no longer a place where ANYONE from Taiwan would go for a break. We hadn’t known that. After that trip, one of the bywords in our home was, “If you misbehave, you’ll be sent to ChiaYi Farm.”

    Electrostatic cleaning is accomplished when every member of the cleaning staff wears a copper bracelet and a magnetic belt when working on your room.

    How do you manage airports these days?
    I take the train.

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  2. We stayed in a hotel in New Orleans this weekend parts of which were built in 1852. There were interesting exposed brick sections highlighting the oldest parts. Our room looked out over Canal St and Bourbon St. It was pretty lively out there every night until early morning. It is said to be haunted, but the only spirits I encountered were those in the coolers carried by the 4 bus loads of college sorority and fraternity members who were staying at the hotel for Spring Formal.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    If the header photo is of the Everclear, then the Minimalist Decor firm must have decorated.

    My latest, weirdest experience at a hotel lately came in Trinidad Colorado at the LaQuinta hotel where we often stay going to or from AZ. The facility was in chaos but the weirdness was not about the hotel, but about a guest. Two years ago as the COVID pandemic descended, we headed for home several weeks early because everything was so uncertain, and hotels were on the list of contagious places. Many, many other travelers had the same idea, leaving the hotel crowded, confused and chaotic. They were also remodeling, so the entire facility was a mess. The parking lot was holding large garbage bins, so there was not room to park.

    Early in the morning I took the dogs out to pee and to open our car. People were loading up cars, so the parking lot was busy and crowded. My nervous dog was barking at everything and would.not.settle.down.to.pee. Suddenly, out of nowhere while I am trying to get into the car and the dog is going crazy, some guy points at my license plate and sticks his face in mine (germs!) and says in his Southern accent, “I bet you don’t expect me to support Tr****. I’m Gay. Nobody in your state likes him.” He had rainbow stickers on his car along with political statements. At that point he could have held views favoring aliens, and I would not have wanted to think about politics or his gender identity. I wanted my dog to calm down and pee. His behavior got her more upset because she saw him as threatening. I just turned around, drug my dog with me, and walked inside, and the dog did not pee til later.

    Really?

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  4. The most “interesting” time I’ve had in a hotel was many years ago, when we shared the WisCon hotel (the Concourse, if anyone knows Madison WI) with a Scottish wedding party. I don’t know the timeline of everything that happened, but in the course of the weekend they stole an antique British flag from a display belonging to a private collector; one of them (drunk, of course) stumbled into the street and got hit by a car, not too badly; they piped (at full volume) the bride and groom to their room, which of course was on our floor; and a few groomsmen found their way onto the lower hotel roof, which of course was outside our window. When we called the desk about the drunk guys cavorting on the railing-less roof, the Security guy crawled out of our window to get onto the roof and never came back (presumably he went down the stairs, but we never did find out). So, that was fun. WisCon is a pretty serious academic-leaning con, not even cosplay-friendly, so that was definitely the wildest time we ever had there.

    I have never flown, and the more I hear about airport security and people getting into fights on planes, the less I want ever to step foot on one.

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    1. Man, oh man, Crowgirl, that sounds wild. As far flying is concerned, it truly doesn’t have much to recommend it these days. If there’s an alternate way getting where you’re going, I’d explore that.

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      1. I don’t have anyplace to be atm, but I’ve been on Amtrak a couple times and train is definitely my conveyance of choice. The only bad part of the trip to Chicago for Worldcon was Amtrak unaccountably failing to stop at the Norske Nook in Osseo so everyone could get off and have breakfast.

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  5. Attending a family wedding,
    We stayed at a really nice B&B in Charleston SC with several other members of my family. We all had separate bedrooms, but could gather in the dining room to talk. It was a neat old house, fancy wood trim, and a stone fireplace. It was a very pleasant stay.
    I’d rather forget the crappy hotels I’ve stayed in. Just not clean, no crazy party stories or anything.

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  6. When Robin and I married almost 52 years ago, we were both students and didn’t have any money. A college friend of Robin’s offered us the use of her family’s cabin in Estes Park in the Rocky Mountains, so that was our honeymoon plan.

    We were married in the morning and after a brunch and the obligatory socializing, we got in the car about noon and headed west. We drove across Minnesota and as far into South Dakota as Chamberlain. By then it was dark and we were, as you can imagine, pretty tired so we stopped there to find a motel. We hadn’t made any advance reservations—I don’t think that was a thing you normally did back then—and we soon discovered that every single motel in town was full. As Robin remembers. it, the lack of available space was because of the motorcycle rally in Sturgis and the timing of our dilemma would corroborate that but Chamberlain is a long way from Sturgis so I’m not entirely sure. At any rate, we begged and pleaded until one motel proprietor allowed that they had a room that might be available. It was cobbled together, with the floor rising and falling at various levels as one moved from room to room but it had a bed and it was available.

    Many years later on our way back from the Black Hills with our daughters we paused in Chamberlain to seek out our honeymoon suite. Without too much difficulty we located the Golden Pheasant Motel, which was still in business and where we had stayed on our wedding night. Separate from the rest of the motel, the room was now being used as a storage shed.

    This was long before electrostatic cleaning had been invented.
    We haven’t flown anywhere since before Covid.

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  8. Electrostatic cleaning, as I understand it, involves a person with a length of chain looped around their waist and dragging on the floor. The person, with a glass rod in one hand and a piece of fur in the other, rubs them together as he or she walks slowly through the room.

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  11. I’m thinking that a Roomba might qualify as an electrostatic cleaner; especially if it gets stuck somewhere and just sits there and spins its wheels. Otherwise, I suspect it might be one of those nasty, fluffy thingies on a stick that my domestic fairy waves around to dislodge dust. Don’t know how much dust is actually picked up, but most of our paintings hang askew (Wordle!) when she leaves, so I know she has at least redistributed it.

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  12. I’ve had some interesting ones. There was the one time in Puerto Vallarta where I got creepy sick phone calls in the middle of the night and ended up calling the front desk and having a security person sit outside my room the rest of the night because the hotel was full and couldn’t move me.

    YA and I stayed in a very interesting hotel in Maine once. We had found this room online, extremely cheap and it turned out it was because it was directly over a little restaurant. The smell was undescribable. And it turned out not to be a good idea to walk around on that carpet in your bare feet. Luckily we just had a two night stay.

    I’m pretty sure electrostatic cleaning has to do with lasers and flashlights. And mirrors.

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  14. Glad you’re home safe and sound, Renee.

    Have been in some interesting motels, bnbs, and air bnbs, but it’s too late to go into detail. Last airport was for destination wedding in Maui (!) in 2019, and that was enough air travel for a long time. I’ll take the train any day instead of flying.

    Enjoyed the various versions of electrostatic cleaning – cleaver baboons.

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