Monday, August 19
Drive time from San Antonio to El Paso was just under eight hours. Yeah, everything really is bigger in Texas. Upon entering town we headed straight for our hotel.
Deborah did her usual room check before unpacking. Typically she makes sure everything is in order and inspects the mattresses for bedbugs. The bedspread had a really ugly stain and that stain had gone through the sheets and into the mattress. It was vile and disgusting. She also found hairballs in the bathroom (trust me, you’ll thank us for not giving complete details).
I walked back to the lobby and told all of this to the clerk. She offered to have the room cleaned. I insisted on a new room.
When we got to the second room we swiped the card and the light turned green but the door was still locked. We couldn’t get it. I went back to the front desk. They said that they would have maintenance come right over and fix whatever problems we had. By the time I had gotten back one of the house maids had opened the door for Deborah. It seems the handle turned UP instead of the usual DOWN. Seriously?!
The second room was almost as disgusting as the first one. It was time to find a new hotel. We went back to the lobby and told the clerk. Once again she offered to have the room cleaned. We said we were leaving and wanted a refund. Our request was denied. I asked to speak to the manager. We were told that the manager had just gone out. We told the clerk to call the manager on her cell phone but she said that she couldn’t do that.
We went back to our car and found another hotel. Once there I put in a call to booking.com. Generally these types of aggregating services (booking.com, hotels.com, AirBNB, etc.) are great unless something goes wrong and you need help. It’s very difficult to get someone on the line and impossible to get them to take any sort of action.
Like previous times we’re called booking.com we waited about 20 minutes before we got to speak to someone. He listened to our story and said that we should hold while he tried to contact the hotel. After an additional 30 minutes of waiting the call dropped. It’s not clear which end dropped the call but we weren’t surprised; we’ve gotten cut off before any sort of resolution every time we’ve contacted booking.com in the past. Since it was all a fait accompli we logged into our account and filed a complaint. They’re supposed to get back to us without 48 hours. Experience has shown that it will be closer to seven days and their response will be, “you should have called us right away, now there’s nothing we can do”.
We spent a couple of hours in our new hotel room resting and hoping not to get PTSD from what we’d seen. By 6:00 pm we decided to head out to a local restaurant called the West Texas Chophouse. Their claim to fame is that they dry age all of their beef on site for 30 days.
(Meat and Taters)
We ordered two steaks which came with baked potatoes. The quality of the meat was very good but they were not well prepared. They came off of the grill quite charred and without any seasoning whatsoever. The steaks lacked any real flavor. For dessert we tried their tres leches and it too was simply ok. Total cost: $61.27.
(Tres Leches)