Saturday, October 16, 2010
Hipstamatic Road Trip
8:20 PM | 
Posted by
Cheryl |
At the end of a too-busy week, Mark and I took a road trip. We were travelling to Cincinnati to participate in the wedding of Mark's boyhood friend. We took the slow road (52) to Cincy, and enjoyed every bit of it. I snapped some pictures with my new iphone, using my Hipstamatic App, which makes even boring pictures look kind of cool and old. Yesterday it was dry and mostly brown, but the hipstamatic improved the shot quite a bit with its funky filters. The sky, however, was just as beautiful as pictured. Blue and full of cool fall breezes!
All of these were taken out the window, which you really tell in that last photo with the tell tale rearview mirror. I love farmland, farmhouses, and barns. Maybe it's because I'm a city girl. I also loved seeing all the small towns we passed through. Most had an impressive stone courthouse rising up from the storefronts and gingerbread trimmed houses. I could have taken five hours to traverse the two hours worth of road. There were beautiful church doors, one room school houses built in the 1800's, beautiful landscapes - if only we could have stopped every 10 minutes. Instead I had to be content shooting out the window with my phone and camera.
The new iphone was also handy for finding a place to stay for the night. We have a few hotel chains we're partial to, and one of them is Hampton Inn. So I began to type in Hampton Inn in Hamilton, OH and got a list of matches to my search. Low and behold, I found a Hampton Inn just a few miles from where the wedding would be. I mapped our course on the phone and we were all set. I did think it was a little odd that this hotel location wasn't listed on the Hampton Inn website, but somehow managed to ignore that little red flag.
We went through town, following the turn-by-turn directions given by my phone's map app. The neighborhood got worse and worse. We even crossed the tracks. We hoped the hotel would be in a nicer area than the one we were in . . . but then, there it was:
Do you notice the name? Not Hampton Inn, but Hamilton Inn!! As in Hamilton, Ohio, the city we were in! Duh. For some reason, after the long wait and slow decent into the wrong part of town, I found this hilarious. The picture does not do justice to just how horrible this place was. A few store fronts past this establishment, there was a store dedicated to bed bug eradication, complete with hazmat suits in the window. Ew. This led to a discussion of an article I'd read about how the Cincinnati Public Library is fighting a bedbug infestation, along with the entire city of Cincinnati. EW! Previous to that moment, I had not connected our trip to the wedding with the article I'd read on the Cincy Public Library's situation. My skin began to feel a little twitchy.
I got back on my phone to find a real hotel, and found a Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Hamilton on the river. I called their 800 number and made a reservation for a room. At the end of the call, the woman at the national reservation center asked me if I had visited this hotel before. When I said no, she said, "Well, let me be the first to welcome you, and to assure you that we have all new linens in this hotel." All new linens? What an odd thing to say. We assumed it was a generic reassurance related to all Cincinnati area hotels. But then I realized I had not checked Tripadvisor for customer reviews, something I always, always, always do before going to a hotel. When I checked Tripadvisor (drat that iphone and its convenience), the most recent entry mentioned having had bed bugs at the very hotel we were headed to, a mere two weeks before. I was now randomly scratching my twitchy skin. Did I already have them just by driving through??? EWWW!
We pulled into the hotel parking lot, and sat. I did not want to get out. Bedbugs? Really? BEDBUGS!? I was ready to find another hotel. Anything. But I did see that the manager had replied to the post about bedbugs on tripadvisor and stated that the hotel had an isolated incident and had completely cleaned not only the room in question, but the entire hotel. Time was running short to get to the rehearsal dinner, so Mark talked me down off the ledge and into the hotel. It's good to be married to a psychologist. I did not mention bedbugs at the front desk, not wanting to scare off the other customers. Not yet. It was a beautiful room, but I still felt itchy. I looked under the sheets. I looked between the pillows and the mattresses. Along the walls. In the drawers. On the carpet. Nothing. But still I twitched.
Fortunately, there really were no bedbugs, and the room and hotel were absolutely lovely. I slept well. On the way home I wrote a nice Tripadvisor review for the hotel on my iphone.
Below is the view from our hotel room. The first picture was taken with my iPhone hipstamatic app, and then my regular iphone camera. Doesn't hipstamatic make life look prettier? And hipper?
Below is the view from our hotel room. The first picture was taken with my iPhone hipstamatic app, and then my regular iphone camera. Doesn't hipstamatic make life look prettier? And hipper?
The wedding was lovely, the drive was lovely, and the lack of bedbugs was lovely. Now. Back to work and busy-ness . . . but only until Thursday night. Then I get to go pick up Amy for fall break. Life's good!
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