Three-Whiskey Hotel

I do a lot of traveling.  I love traveling.  I have stayed in a lot of lodging.  I don't always love the lodging.  Good lodging is like home away from home.  Bad lodging is like an attack on all of your senses and a desire that your skin not make contact with anything.

The things I love include tight white sheets and shades that block out sunlight in the morning, then spring open to reveal abundant natural light when I am ready to get up.  I don't give a rat's ass about room service, but a continental breakfast that includes fruit is high on my list.  I just want one food-thing that is not over five years away from its life source.  A hard boiled egg counts...  unless it is over five years away from its life source.
 I appreciate good coffee, but I'll take bad coffee over no coffee.  I prefer if said coffee is in my room, but in the lobby is fine.  I have been known to pay for the overpriced cup of Starbuck's if that's what's in the building.  It just has to be in the building.  But c'mon!  If you're the Hilton or the Hyatt, put that shit in my room.  Don't make me put on a bra to pad down three hallways and seven floors to get it.  Or, just don't be put-off when I bumble through your lobby in the eye-catching combo of tennis shoes and pajama pants, topped-off with matted hair.  Your more-refined guests who are checking in or out will wonder what kind of an establishment you run.  And I am not above a public exhibition of excessive scratching and the exclamation:  "How do you guys have mosquitoes?  In January?  In the beds?"

There was only one hotel I ever visited that offered its coffee in another building.  It would be my luck that this lodging was provided for me in Iowa.  In February.  Have you ever been to Iowa in February?  The doormat outside my room was iced over.  Ice.  On which to wipe my feet...?  To get to the single pot of coffee in the hotel lobby, I had to cross a treacherous icy second-story walkway, descend a life-threatening flight of exposed steps --also iced-over-- and cross a parking lot where winds were strong enough to sweep small children up and off to Wisconsin.
The coffee was not of high quality.
Nor was my mood.
That was the beginning of the Whiskey Hotels.

* There was the time I was in WV in a ground-level hotel room with an exterior entrance (Call me Diva, but I'm not a big fan of the exterior entrance.)  The shower head would not stay mounted on the wall, but the sprayer worked just fine.  One simply had to spray oneself instead of the standard passive-shower, which is so much more agreeable to the tired individual first thing in the morning.  It was the housekeeper that explained to me the shower-head situation:

HK:  Yeah, it won't stay on the wall... but it'll scrub yer butt.

I'm still not sure where she intended the emphasis in that sentence to fall.  Scrub infers that the mechanism has plenty of strength to wash my body down.  Butt infers that the mechanism will do a better job than it could from a mounted position at cleaning the parts where The Sun Don't Shine.  I think, either way, she meant it as a positive.  And I was positively shiny that week.
One Whiskey.

** I was at a hotel breakfast room in western Kentucky when a woman taught me a hotel tip that I wish I'd never known.  I had brought the little pot-bellied coffee carafe down from my room into the breakfast area.  I was in my standard tennis shoes-and-pajama-pants getup, about to do some writing.  I brought the carafe down with me so I could fill it up once, then plant myself at a secluded table near a window and avoid parading my less-than-attractive ensemble back and forth to the coffee dispenser three times... or more... one never knows how much coffee will do the trick; the variety of strength from one hotel to the next is wide.  With my full mini pot, I shuffle my way to my spot, where the single shred of sunlight in the room falls at a slant.  A woman approaches -another guest- gives me a wry smile, and in an only partially hushed voice says, "I know what you mean..."

ME:  Hmm?
HER:  I never use the coffee makers in the rooms, either.  They're disgusting.
ME: Oh, (fuzzy-headed and uncomprehending) I was just being lazy.
HER:  Well, it's a good habit.  Those coffee makers are repulsive.  Especially when they place them on the bathroom counter.  Have you ever looked inside one of those things?

Of course, when I got back to my room, I looked.
Sleep no more.  MacGinna will sleep no more.
Two Whiskeys.

*** Then there was the hotel in Watertown, NY.  Slogan:  Where's the water?  Where's the town?  There was a mix up with reservations where I was supposed to stay, and the Astrological and Holistic Convention was being held there, so there was absolutely no vacancy.  So, I had to go to an EconoLodge down the street: a dark and urine-stained lineup of smoking-rooms that beheld some bad, bad energy.  The situation called for nothing short of an Astrologist or Holistic Healer.  If only I knew where to find one...  Using my own underdeveloped powers, I sensed that perhaps a hooker had been killed on the premises.  My intuitive travel companion disputed:

T.C.:  It's worse than that.  Like bad ju-ju.  Like this hotel was built on ancient burial ground and all who walk upon it disturb the spirits of noble Native Americans.
(Short pause.)
ME:  You feel like a whiskey?

It took three rounds before we felt that sleep might be possible back at the site.
An ambitious thought.
And incorrect.
Three Whiskeys.

Station 400 is kind of famous in Sarasta, FL for its brunch.  But its coffee is not to be overlooked.  Two years ago, I flipped for their Ethiopian coffee.  Now they serve and equally awesome Columbian coffee.  Their menu is so delightful, especially the inclusion of flavored butters and syrups (vanilla lavender?!)

www.station400.com/

400 North Lemon Avenue  Sarasota, FL 34236
(941) 906-1400