The Seven Deadly Hotels

Hello everyone! As we travel around the continent, we are sometimes left to our own devices with regards to accommodations. Often on the night of a show there are hotel rooms provided for us, but when there aren't or when we're on a driving day with no show, it's up to us to figure out where we feel like resting our heads for the evening. Often the city/town/middle of nowhere is dictated to us by the necessities of travel that day, but we can pick and choose our hotel of choice. Being a money grubbing weasel who is always trying to save as many pennies as we can, my vote is usually for the cheapest most vile dive of a dump we can possibly find. Basically, if the organism at the check-in counter has any fewer than six legs, the hotel's too ritzy for me! This has lead to a number of interesting/amusing experiences over the years, and so I'd like to share with you now the seven most horrifying hotels in which we've ever stayed. I give you: The Seven Deadly Hotels!

7. Last year we stayed in a hotel in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I don't remember the name of it, but it smacked of crime. There were a couple of entrances to the highway right next to the hotel for a quick getaway, and the room looked like the kind of place you'd want to get away from in a big hurry. There wasn't too much particularly crazy about this hotel, but several pieces of furniture in each room looked like they'd been chopped to pieces with an axe, or maybe like someone had systematically dropped pianos on each piece, then tried to put them back in the room and hoped that no one would notice. All in all, the rooms had a very shady feel about them that's kind of hard to describe, and were in VERY poor shape with bathrooms about big enough for a spider to comment "well honey, it's a little cozy, but it's all we can afford right now". The beds were pretty uncomfortable as I recall, but as long as I wasn't going to die there that night I wasn't going to make a big issue of it.

6. On our way to pick up Mark at the Philadelphia airport one time we stopped for the night in Binghampton, New York. I don't really remember why we didn't have enough time to go all the way to Philly that day, but for some reason we didn't. This was one of those motels out on some side road outside of town where all the doors to the rooms face the road. The furniture was intact in this room, but the walls and ceiling of the room hadn't fared quite as well. One of the rooms was missing some ceiling tiles, and there were a variety of electrical wires hanging down from the ceiling into the room.

The bathroom lights didn't work, so at night you were completely in the dark. Also, the bathroom had one of those brutal shower stalls made of those tiny square tiles like they had in your high school change room. As a reasonably tall person, I've never been a big fan of shower stalls, and this one was tight and didn't seem particularly clean. At least the bathroom did have a window, so during the day time there was light, but the ground floor window was fully transparent (a little unusual for a bathroom window), and what little there was in the way of a curtain was translucent and wasn't capable of covering the whole window. Not that this was of particularly great concern, but it was just odd. I don't think I've ever seen that before or since. The water from the tap at this motel tasted particularly vile if I remember correctly; so much so that you'd be tempted to slowly die of thirst before chancing the gustatory ordeal of sampling another millilitre of that poisonous fluid.

5. Ah, now on to the Canmore Hotel in Canmore, Alberta. This was both our gig and our hotel that evening. There was a bar/club on the bottom floor that actually wasn't half bad, but the accommodations left a few things to be desired. It's always nice when your hotel for the evening is within walking distance from the gig, but I would have gladly gone some distance that night. Strangely, the hotel goes by the nickname "The Ho", and uses the slogan "Your Ho away from home". I'm not making this up. Apparently it's one of those places that more or less every young local has worked at for at least a few days to make a little extra money. Anyway, on to the hotel.

We were given five single rooms, which sounds exciting as we usually share rooms, but we soon found out why. All the rooms there are single rooms approximately the size of a large walk-in closet. The rooms don't have bathrooms; there's one communal bathroom in the middle of the single hallway. Now, the condition of the the rooms wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either. The bedspread had some cigarette burns through it, and so did the sheets, but they seemed clean enough otherwise. There was a tall window in the room with a white curtain about the thickness of a proton which blocked out absolutely no light (in fact, I'm not sure that the curtain wasn't emitting some of the light that was coming through). The heat was permanently on in the room, but it was on low enough in my room that the heat was bearable (one of the other guys opted to sleep in the van to escape the unbearable heat in his room). It also allowed me to use my bedspread as a curtain to block out the fiery ball of death rising over the mountains in the morning.

Now, none of this would have been too bad if it weren't for the fact that the walls were paper thin, and there was a non-stop all-night party going on in the short hallway connected to the few rooms available. Let me now explain what I mean by "party". There was the usual laughing and drinking and carrying on that usually accompanies the word, but additionally there were skateboarders riding up and down the hallway running into walls and doors, wall riding the doors themselves on occasion. Trying to sleep through what was going on was more or less analogous to trying to sleep in the middle of an active construction site, or trying to sleep in a county that also contains me laughing at something.

4. We once stayed in a university-run motel in Tallahassee, Florida. Now, at a cursory glace, and if someone had chopped off your nose and removed your lungs, these rooms appeared to be just fine and dandy! Unfortunately, I still had my nose and lungs (although upon setting foot in the room I began frantically searching for a pair of pinking shears with which to clip off my nose) and so my experience in this hotel was thus sabotaged. The air was more or less alive with mould and mildew. In fact I'm pretty sure I heard a few spores chuckling to themselves when they saw us enter. The room was pretty close to 1,000,000 degrees Centigrade (1,800,032 degrees Fahrenheit), and so I promptly turned on the air conditioning. This was I'm sure just what the spores were waiting for, because it turned out that the entire spore army was lurking inside the room's wall mounted air conditioning unit. The density of mildew stench in the air reached that of soup (and I mean a really thick, business-like soup with lots of chunks of things in it; more of a stew really. A mould and mildew stew in a stench broth), and so we were left to decide whether to cook slowly in our skins or permanently lose the use of our respective noses. I think my room opted to go with the loss-of-nose angle.

That was really the most serious thing, but the rooms were lacking smoke detectors. We knew because there was a big hole in the ceiling with wires hanging out of it where the smoke detector should have been in each room. At first we thought it was just the one room we'd been in so far, so a couple of the guys asked the front desk for another room, specifically mentioning the smoke-detector oriented reason for this request. They were happy to oblige, and sent them to another room. The lack of smoke detector was in a different spot in the room this time, but the story was basically the same. It turned out that ALL of the rooms had had their respective smoke detectors ripped out, and I'm not sure if we ever found out exactly why.

On top of all that, the bed was one of those beds that feels like it's just a lattice of criss-crossing wires instead of anything resembling what would conventionally be called a "mattress". You could actually see the lines of the wires through the sheet on the bed. Just a lovely stay. I slept like a walrus who just found out that he's being evicted in the morning, and his land lord's away for the week on vacation and can't be reached.

3. One time we stayed in a little motel in Holyoke, Massachusettes; I forget the name. This one was pretty interesting. I'm not quite sure how they stayed in business, because it seemed like no one had stayed there in years. You know how things look in a movie after there's been some sort of nuclear holocaust (or zombies, or killer virus or whatever) that killed off all the inhabitants of a small town, and then some unaffected person comes to town and wanders around wondering what happened to everyone? That's how this room looked. Everything was in its place, but there was a thick layer of dust on everything in the rooms. I mean dust that you could write in with your finger. There was also a wide variety of stains on the floor (poor Mark had to sleep on that disgusting floor that night if I remember correctly) and some cigarette burns in the sheets. The crowning glory of this hotel though was the shower. I can remember Craig coming over to the room I was in asking to use our shower because his was only able to manage a vigorous dripping possibly sufficient to get a paramecium damp only to find that our shower gave forth a brown sludge that I guess was supposed to pass for water. In short, it wasn't easy to stay clean in any capacity in this motel!

2. And now on to possibly the shadiest motel in which we've ever stayed. Just about 20 minutes or so into New Jersey from New York City (I forget the name of the town) we stayed in what could best be thought of as an anti-palace. The place had hourly rates posted, which really doesn't bode that well for the clientele, but that was just the beginning of it. Our room looked like it had had a recent coat of paint on it to cover up a wide variety of graffiti written on the walls, but that hadn't stopped the people staying there from writing more graffiti on top. I wish I could remember what the walls said in there, but I think there were some pretty wild things. There was a channel on the TV that between the hours of something like midnight and something like 11am showed some rather questionable programming not at all suitable for younger viewers as part of your basic room fee, and there were a number of other clues among the room's lengthy and verbose graffiti that strongly spoke to regular visitations by ladies (and perhaps gentlemen) of the evening. The bathroom door wouldn't really stay closed all that well, and was covered in graffiti on the inside, and the shower was in such a state that it was easy to believe that you might be dirtier after using it than you were before. After sleeping in the bed though, I was willing to take that chance.

1. And now the number one filthiest place we've ever stayed. I still look back on this place and wonder if it really existed. Perhaps it emerges from a cloud of smog and toxic gas once every hundred years or so, or maybe it was built by a bunch of pranksters seeing just how much a band would be willing to endure without complaining. The place in question was the band house provided by a bar called "Amigos" or "Amigo's" (I forget which) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. What a piece of work this place was. Let me try to paint you a picture.

First, I went up the narrow staircase next to the door to Amigo's that led over the bar. At the top of the stairs, it looked like some kind of drug dealer's last resort hideout. There was a white (well, formerly white) plastic table and a few plastic chairs (the kind that you could probably buy a set of at a variety store for about $15.00) that were all covered in graffiti in black sharpie. EVERYTHING in this place was covered in band stickers and graffiti. Hanging from a long, vandalized, 1cm metal pipe running down from the ceiling over the table that probably should have ended in an overhead light was a soiled towel, or garment of some kind. I didn't want to know badly enough to explore its nature beyond a visual inspection as it hung. There was another "table" in the room which was an upside down broken television, its screen covered in vandalized band stickers to a degree that would have made turning it on pointless even if it hadn't been broken.

The bathroom was covered in band stickers and thoroughly offensive graffiti of every description from ceiling to floor. The mirror was so covered in stickers as to be completely useless. There were stickers and graffiti inside the toilet bowl! The shower was covered in mocking graffiti, although I think it was more or less free of stickers. Beside the shower was a pile of small, thin hand towels, which were to serve as bath towels for us. Apparently, there was one bath towel as well, but Craig (being the first one into the room) wisely saw and squirreled it away for his own use in the morning, and then came out of the bathroom complaining about how there were only hand towels for us. I salute his quick thinking!

On to the "beds". There were five filthy mattresses lying in various corners of the two adjoining doorless rooms. Most of them were falling apart: foam and such falling out of their sides and corners. I had to shake the dirt and gravel out of the sheets of my bed (I swear that I'm not exaggerating here) and dust off my pillow before I dared lay down to sleep. This is one of the only occasions in my life where I've ever chosen to sleep in my clothes from that day. I think I was the second last person to shower in the morning, and like a weasel of a fink, ended up using the last few hand towels to dry off. Even at that, I wasn't completely dry. I'm probably forgetting some of the details of this room, and I wish that we'd had a camera with us to show just how crazy the place was, but alas, it's lost to the ages now.

Well, there's the top seven. Honourable mention should also go to the Knight's Inn in Dayton, where Brian, Laura and I tried three different rooms before we found one that didn't reek of cat urine (after the door knob to the first room we tried fell apart in my hands while trying to lock it. In its defense though, it did look like the door had been broken down a few times in its life). Honorable mention also goes to a hotel in Victoria, B.C. that we didn't end up staying in. After all, we have some standards! This one was on top of a strip club, and the ear-plug-dispensing man at the counter advised us not to use the elevator, and further advised in a very friendly and helpful way that we not stay there. There was vomit in the hallway by the rooms, and the one room we did see had random pieces of carpet laid over damaged spots in the floor through which came the pounding music from the bar below.

If any of you thought that life on the road was a glamorous thing, I hope I've enlightened you to some degree! On the whole, I should say these kinds of places are the exception rather than the rule, but we've definitely seen some interesting things in our travels!