Yes, We Have No Bandanas

Dateline St. Paul, Minnesota 7/11/09

When you make twenty three hotel stops in forty days, some for multiple nights and some not, you cannot go undefeated. Sooner or later, you will get a dumb hotel in a dumb place. It is amazing that we were on the road for 33 nights before we encountered this statistical inevitability.

I have to say we could not have done any better with our venues on this trip. We picked some hotels from our past experience; many my assistant Martha researched after I told her where I wanted to stay. She has done a phenomenal job. But in St. Paul, our luck runs out, in part because I tell her I want to stay in St. Paul, and not Minneapolis. We have a reservation at a place called the Best Western Bandana Square in St. Paul. Martha showed me where it was on the map, and I cast no blame on her whatsoever. The hotel was a converted streetcar barn, it was fairly near St. Paul's Cathedral, and although it was not a premium hotel brand, it sounded like it would be fun and after all, this was a one night stopover.

In the first place, I have always been a little skeptical of Minnesotans. I don't get Nordic stoicism, Nordic humor, Garrison Keillor (if he is an example of Nordic humor), or why people would live in a place this damn cold, on purpose. They once elected TV wrestler Jesse Ventura as Governor, and now they have literally elected a clown for a U.S. Senator. Don't get me wrong; to be bipartisan, Governor Mark Sanford (R) of South Carolina is obviously a clown too, after he told his wife he was going for a walk in the Appalachians and wound up with his girlfriend in Argentina. But Sanford didn't have "clown" on his resume, until now. Al Franken had it on his resume and got elected anyway.

To give the Senate credit, they went along with the joke and put Al on the Judiciary Committtee to help vet Judge Sotomayor's nomination. I think blonde jokes must have originated in Minnesota, as well as blond jokes.

Anyway, the joke is on me, because as we approach the hotel from our trip across the backroads of Iowa and Minnesota, the navigation system ticks off the miles- to- go and I can see peripherally that my co-pilot does not like what she sees as the miles dwindle and finally turn into fractional miles. We pass a minor league baseball stadium where the Double A St. Paul Saints are playing the Sioux City Explorers, which makes me think that a gentrified renaissance area is just around the corner, because there are a ton of people marching to this game and filling the large ballpark. But, when we make the last turn, we arrive at a perfectly decent-looking building that appears to be situated in an office park.

This is better than being in a bad neighborhood of ill-behaved people, and I point out to my disappointed crew that we cannot stay every night at the Waldorf-Astoria, and that sometimes you just have to stay in Waldorf. This failed to produce any laughs so I told my sherpas to get to work.

We checked in and hauled our loads to our rooms which were not connected. I noticed that there appeared to be a large family reunion in the hotel, or maybe a wedding reception, based on the throngs of folks gathered in the lobby who all seemed to know one another. After we unloaded all the bags, Connie went out to do something while I watched Fiona in our room. From the next room, there was a tremendous racket of hollering, yelling and screaming. I could hear most of the profane discourse clearly through our air conditioning vent. Also, although our room was designated as non-smoking, I could smell smoke through the vents coming into our room. (lest I seem holier-than-thou, this is merely payback for my past bad behavior, I know).

I go out into the hall and the smell of cigarette smoke is thick. Also, two more large braided Rastafarians are knocking on the door of the room next door, the source of the smoke and noise, trying to gain admittance to the crap game or whatever the hell is going on in there. I thinkthis does not bode well for a good night's sleep, since it is still daylight. Connie returns and said she just saw a woman and a young child leaving said room, the woman being in tears. She also says she cannot find the restaurant in the hotel and she is hungry. Also, the hotel has a central indoor pool, and she hates them generically with a passion, because the whole hotel smells like chlorine, the pool is fillied with shrieking children, the concrete surfaces amplify said shrieks, and those shrieks are a siren song for Fiona, who wants to go swimming in the unsupervised pool. I am hoping for the sound of a few gunshots to make her completely happy with our accommodations but we are not in the wild west anymore.

I go to the front desk and ask for a different room. I thought about appealing to the Rastafarians in that they would have thought it wildly amusing that I ask them to break up the party at 7pm, but Connie is not in the mood for any jokes. I get a different room and load the innumerable bags and we trek to a different part of the hotel where they have several non-smoking rooms in a row. After unpacking again, I return to the front desk to ask where the restaurant is because Connie cannot find it. Probably she was freaked out by the pool.

I ask where the restaurant is and the girl says with a straight face "Three blocks that way", pointing. I tell her I am serious, we have been in the car for ten hours and we need to eat. But she is serious. "Gabe's Roadhouse is our restaurant!" she explains. "You'll like it, it is great food, and it is only a short walk!". For all of this hotel's apparent shortcomings, its only saving grace is that the otherwise untrained staff are unfailingly enthusiastic. I look around at this family reunion and wonder how they are having a banquet in the large meeting room. Seconds later a delivery truck from a chicken and ribs place pulls up and starts unloading. That answers that. I take note that the delivery is not from Gabe's Roadhouse.

I report to Connie that indeed she was correct, the restaurant is slightly off-premises. We muster the gang and begin the walk. It is impossible to gauge whether it is three blocks, because we are in an office park and there are no intersecting streets that would form a block. I determine that by the word "block", the girl at the front desk meant "600 yards".

I am the oldest person in Gabe's Roadhouse by 30 years. Everyone there is eating pizza or a cheeseburger and drinking beer, being as that is all there is on the menu. I ask the waitress if there is a college campus nearby, I just have to ask. She explains in a tone usually reserved for grade schoolers who are not following instructions that there are many, which she names one by one, slowly, so I can comprehend.

When I return by foot to the Best Western Bandana Square Natatorium, Inn Resort and Towers at Saint Paul Minnesota Which Is The Capital You Betcha, I decide to watch TV. I point the remote at the TV and press "Power" but nothing. I finally notice that the TV is a Philips, while the remote is an RCA. I call my girls at the front desk. By now we are old friends. I don't know why they call this Square "Bandana"; all I know is they will need to blindfold me with one to get me into this place again. I get the taller girl; I know her voice by now. I tell her the obvious problem. She says "Oh, it's no problem, the RCA is a Universal Remote- you just have to program it."

I contemplate a civil response but I guess I am taking too long because she finally says " Do you need help programming it?"

I admit to her with some embarrassment that I am not a programmer and that any assistance would be most appreciated.

She then walks me through a set of steps- hold the code search button down, then this button, that button, turn it off and on, etc. She is reading from a manual, so she reads a step, I perform it, then we confirm it worked, and we go to the next step. I am incredulous that (a) anyone thought this was a good idea, to buy this universal remote, instead of JUST GIVING THE GUEST THE REMOTE THAT COMES FREE WHEN YOU BUY THE TV, and (b) has no one in my room, which is room 114, ever programmed the television before? Actually, the answer as you will soon find out is no, and for good reason. But I press on with the programming.

Finally we reach the end of the programming steps, and at this point I would like to refer you back to all of my previous comments about my skepticism about the good folks from these latitudes, and those remarks should be incorporated by reference again.

The remote still did not work. I advised her of this. She said, "It says here in the instructions you may have to repeat these steps up to 200 times until it can find the right code". This comment from her, while innocent and well- meaning, completely wiped out weeks of East Coast attitude de-programming. I am not yet a mile east of the Mississippi, after spending 6,844 miles west of it, and already I feel that old familiar impatience. I ask her, "Do you expect any guest to perform this ritual up to 200 times to merely watch TV?" She says "No, that doesn't seem fair". And then she says "Would you like me to find a Philips remote in another guestroom and trade it for your RCA remote?" I indicate this would be great. She brings me the remote and takes the RCA remote to wherever she stole the Philips one from.

I am hoping it was from the Rastafarians' room.