So my dad and stepmother are getting a little bit older now.
Not so old that they're nostalgic about the days when they could eat tapioca and rice pudding, you understand, but old enough that they're starting to think about making sure that they get the chance to see everything that they want to see. They've made a bucket list. Two of the things on that list are visiting Yosemite National Park and seeing San Francisco. Since my wife and I live in the central San Joaquin Valley, we're pretty convenient to both of those places, and it's been a couple years since we've seen my parents, so they came to visit.
On Thursday the 19th we drove up to San Francisco the long way. We went to the coast, down to Monterey, and then took the coast highway up through Santa Cruz and hit San Francisco. The hotel that they'd booked was on Van Ness, and as we get into town it really looks like a good area. All the buildings are just beautiful, the shops seem very upscale, and we're pumped.
Then we arrived at the hotel. It's the Heritage Marina Hotel, located at 2550 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.
My dad is now fired from ever again making hotel reservations.
My first clue should have been the parking space. My parents had rented a Hyundai Sonata - I'll talk more about that another time - and it's not really a very big car, but the parking spaces were incredibly narrow. I mean
narrow. There were concrete walls blocking the edges of the space, and it was impossible to park the car in any way so that you could get out on both sides of the car. (Not a problem for me - I was on the passenger side!)
We made it to the lobby. It looked ... threadbare, but not
that bad. Not yet. My dad checked us all in, got the keys for the room, all that stuff.
Then we went to the elevator.
There was a woman with a baby waiting at the ground floor for the elevator. She'd been waiting for a while - she had walked away from the check-in counter as we walked in the door, and that was a good ten minutes previously. We waited with her for a few minutes, but really wanted to just get to the room, so we took the stairs to the fourth floor. (Fifth floor really - they follow the stupid European numbering scheme of G-1-2-3-4-5.)
And we found ourselves at the door to room 421.
Now, my dad had booked something called the 'Cow Hollow Suite.' Supposedly it had 2 king size beds, a sitting area, a refrigerator, etc., and was a top of the line room. He had the receipt for this booking (through Expedia) printed out, and he'd emailed me a copy of it, which I had on my iPhone.
Room 421 was not a suite.
It
did appear to have two king size beds, but that was where the resemblance ended. The beds were leaning up against the wall, and drop cloths covered a good chunk of the visible floor area. I suspect that's just as well, because what we could see of the mattresses were covered in stains that resembled blood.
My wife and stepmother didn't get to see the full horrors contained within 421 - they were standing behind me and my dad. My dad's jaw dropped. I started laughing. I didn't have the presence of mind to take any pictures - I wish I had, though.
We made it back to the ground floor on the stairs, and the woman with the baby was still waiting for the elevator. The maintenance drone was explaining to her that it
does work, it's just very slow. (This turned out to be incorrect - the elevator is not slow, it's just that the call button on that floor doesn't work. You can get to the bottom floor on that elevator, it just doesn't come there when called.)
The lady at the counter was not particularly interested in hearing about the situation. She offered us a room on the fifth floor instead, which 'had a view.' It wasn't a suite (in fact, it appears that the Cow Hollow Suite doesn't even exist), but it did have two double beds in it. She didn't apologize for booking a suite that didn't exist, or for having double booked
all their suites. She didn't even offer to refund the difference between a suite and a room with two double beds. That's something we'd have to take up with Expedia, she told us.
We went back to the elevator. Lucky us - the door was open and some people were getting off. The buttons in the elevator stopped at the fourth floor. This was ... disconcerting, to say the least, as we were staying on the
fifth floor. At the 'first' floor (remember: the floor above the ground level) the doors opened again and a young couple got in. The boy had rotten teeth, a buzz cut, and some bad tattoos. The girl had stringy bleached hair, pretty thin and patchy in places, and was scratching at her face and scalp like a dog with the mange. Looks like she had the meth bugs.
"Oh no," she said. "The elevator smells like candy again." My wife and I looked at each other, and I wondered where you buy candy that smells like stale vomit and metal cleaner.
They got off on the third floor, and we continued to the fourth floor, to find ... nothing above us. It appeared that the fourth level was the top, but then noticed that over on the opposite corner of the hotel there was a small block of rooms on a putative fifth floor. Access appeared to be through a stairwell.
At the door to room 531, we found the same maintenance drone from the elevator waiting at the door. He watched very carefully while we inserted the key, and when the door opened he nodded his head and walked away. (Incidentally, the 'view' from the window was actually of the wall of room 527, not of the Golden Gate. To see that, you had to walk down the balcony a good 3 rooms or so.)
The room was ... I guess 'clean' is probably the best word for it. It was clean. The carpet was threadbare, the bathtub and tiles were the color of piss when you've been drinking way too much coffee and no water for a week, and there were no chairs. But it
was clean.
It was also hotter than the eigth circle of hell.
The heater was running at full blast and we couldn't find a control for it. There was no air conditioning. We opened the windows and turned on the ceiling fan. (Really? Ceiling fan? No air conditioning? WTF?) The fan was not even close to balanced - we had to turn it down. At the lowest setting, it still had a 4-inch wobble in the blades.
It was time for dinner. Exercising the better part of valor, we took all our stuff with us on the way out of the room, and this time we went looking for a stairway in the fifth-floor corner that maybe would go to the parking area. We found another elevator there, that actually did come when it was called. This is not, however, to say that it actually made it all the way to the ground floor, though. It only went down as far as the third floor. (Due to the slope of the hill on which the place was built, this was actually only one level above the ground, though.)
We made it to the car without further incident, and put our stuff in the trunk. It was about a 20 minute walk to Fisherman's Wharf, and we poked in and out of shops on the way. After a few hours of looking at shops and boozing (more on that another time), we took a taxi back to the hotel.
My dad wanted ice, so my wife and I went to the car and got our stuff, and my dad and stepmom went to the office. Wife and I went to the bottom of the elevator where we had come part of the way down, and hit the button. Of course, it didn't come down, and the stairwell next to it was locked.
Damnit.Our luck wasn't all bad, though - there was a nice young homeless-looking gentleman there who offered to jump the fence and open the door for us from the inside. Not quite sure how he managed it, but he did, and I gave my wife our bags (they were quite small), and I took one wine bottle by the neck in each hand, just in case. No need for concern, though - the door opened, and the fellow went on about his business.
Climbing up the stairs was an adventure, though. After the first few steps, we entered the single thickest cloud of marijuana smoke that I've ever even imagined. My eyes were burning, and I could swear that I saw a chunk of lung when I coughed. We met the source of the smoke on the stairs - a black gentleman, about 35-40 years old, who dressed like Shaft. The
real Shaft, I mean, not this Samuel L. Jackson crap. He nodded politely and continued down the stairs.
Bursting again into the semi-clean air, we made it back to good old 531 without (further) incident. At this point, I discovered why the maintenance drone had been hanging out there when we checked in: he wanted to make sure that we could open the door. It took about ten minutes to get the door to unlock. We made it back inside, and waited.
About fifteen minutes later my dad and stepmother showed up. The jackass at the counter had been less than helpful, and in fact would not even speak to him. So, failing in his quest to find an ice machine, he walked down the street to a convenience store and bought a bag of ice. On his return with the ice, we commenced the
really serious drinking. (Except my wife. She's got more self respect than my dad and I do.)
We crashed out at ten-thirty or eleven o'clock. (Hey, give me a break - it was a long day!) At some point during the night, woke - briefly - to 'thud, thud,
fuck!' Since the noise stopped pretty quick, I didn't bother to investigate, but in the morning found that my dad and stepmom's bed was listing to port at a solid 20-degree angle. The first thud I'd heard had been the legs on that side of the bed falling off, followed by (the second thud) my dad landing on the floor. The 'fuck!' was - quite predictably, I think - the result of the impact.
At 6:00 AM we awoke. I was fairly well-rested, but the others ... not so much. This was partly due to the shenanigans involving the bed's structural issues, but also due to my snoring. Ah, well - like I said, at least
I was well-rested.
We took our things back down to the car before checking out and getting breakfast. At the bottom of the stairs (the ones that led outside) we found a couple of young and very cold-looking whores waiting for someone to let them in. They were very effusive in their thanks - spandex hot-pants and bikini tops don't insulate very well - and made their way upstairs. I'm not really sure why we were surprised, really. We made our way to the car, then then headed for checkout and breakfast.
Breakfast was interesting. They had two types of cereal (thankfully in the little sealed plastic bowl thingies), and coffee, tea, bagels, etc. The real surprise was the tea - they had actually sprung for several different boxes of Tazo tea - you know, the kind that you buy at Starbucks for exorbitant amounts of money. They cheaped out again on the coffee, though - it was horrible. If 'beige' could be said to be a flavor, I'd have called this 'beige' flavored.
The breakfast crowd was the real interesting bit, though. Off in one corner sat a group of Europeans, later identified (by their clothing) as the Slovenian National Bobsleigh Team. (My wife noted that Slovenia needs to give them more funding.) A woman who looked young-ish but homeless, and reminded me a lot of Ally Sheedy in
The Breakfast Club hunched over the food tables, filling a bag with cereal and bagels. The Shaft-look-a-like from the smoky stairwell came in, still dressed quite nattily in the previous night's clothes, and got food and a table. Several terrified looking touristy couples were scattered throughout the room, heads down, paying strict attention to their food.
And then the pimp showed up.
His clothing didn't give him away. He didn't have platform shoes with goldfish swimming in them, and there was no floppy hat with feathers in evidence anywhere. (Well, there was a leather beret with a small brim, but still no feathers.) He had a black T-shirt with a reggae logo of some sort on it, and black jeans. High-tops and rhinestone & gold sunglasses completed the ensemble. He sat down at a table by himself, arms up on the backs of the adjacent chairs. And he waited.
The two cold whores from the stairwell showed up. They cleaned up pretty well, considering. With jeans and sweatshirts, they could have fit in on any college campus in the nation. (My wife thinks they should look into cosmetology school, but then she might be biased, since she's the dean of education at one.) One sat down on each side of their pimp, they kissed him on the cheek, and he asked the cliched, yet oh-so-predictable question:
"Where my money at, bitches?"*sigh*Would you have it any other way?
The rest of the day was a bit of an anticlimax, after that. I'll write something about Alcatraz and our adventures in the city another time. I've got some pretty good pictures from the day's travels. I wish I'd taken some at the hotel, though. Sorry! I'll do better next time!
