The Very Bad Hotel

| Click here to post a comment
I'm researching hotels for a January trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in doing so I've discovered a new place to mine for creative writing ideas.  That's right, online hotel reviews.  Ever have trouble coming up with original detail in your work? Need a jump start on ideas for setting? Hit Tripadvisor, Expedia, Travelocity, and you'll find they've got all that and more.

But of course it's the BAD hotels that provide the most delicious details. And my new personal favorite hotel in the universe is a resort property "on the beach" in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

This hotel may or may not provide you with a clean room. This hotel may or may not provide you with a room at all, even after you are confirmed. This hotel may, according to those who have stayed there, best be described as a scientific retreat for the Pasteur set, with ample mold to keep you company during your stay. But the reviews themselves are the prize here, not the hotel:

From Expedia.com: "The hotal room was dripping with water as if the walls were sweating..."

Sweating walls! Excellent original detail!

 "...the walls dripped so much water it made the beds wet..."

Now there's a waterfront property for you. Let's think about this for a minute. If the walls dripped so much the bed got wet, does that mean that water was literally leaping off the walls onto the bed? How does that work? And keep in mind this is not the only traveler to report this phenomenon. I say it's time to call NASA and get some top brains on this.

"...on my fourth day of the trip and there was no water at all i had to wait until the afternoon to go out because i could not take a cold shower..."

Now I'm not sure what the complain is here. Obviously there was plenty of water coming out of the walls, so one would be expected to take one's shower in bed.

Let's see what other travelers have to say about this same hotel. From our friends at Tripadvisor (good site, by the way):
 
"it was a hoodlumm spot for the locals!!!!!"

Ah -ha! Now we have some characters to add to our story. As the walls sweat in the Puerto Rican heat, the hoodlums - presumably out of West Side Story - have taken over the reception desk (multiple reviews report that the staff are entirely teenagers. How odd is that? Staffing an entire major resort hotel with teenagers? Is this perhaps the set of some new Disney Channel Spanish language series? "The Suite Life" with Maria y Carlos?).

"When we first arrived, we entered our rooms, to find the overwhelming stench of mold and mildew slap us in the face."

Smell is always a fantastic original detail, isn't it? Excellent. 

To this an employee of the hotel (one of the teenagers perhaps?) responds with the following: "we are currently undergoing renovations."  Well, that's a shame then. Would hate to lose all this original detail.  But at least in the short term, The Very Bad Hotel amuses its guests by using the construction to shut down all the facilities at the resort and shutting off all the hot water to the guest rooms.

In addition, The Very Bad Hotel apparently lost its beach - the beach washed away.  This intrigues me, this idea of the "Lost Beach." Where did it go? Is it in Jamaica, sipping on a nice rum?  Was this hotel SO BAD that the beach itself became dissatisfied and had to leave? Questions I will never answer, as I will be avoiding The Very Bad Hotel.

PS  - Just noticed that Trip Advisor has a "Best and Worst" feature on its front page. Every time you open it you get a best and worst review snippet. The one up right now includes the phrase, "There were dead bugs all over our wall." Splendid!


Dear Blonde Lady,

I realize this is Minnesota. I realize it is the right that Thor and Odin gave you to drive an enormous black SUV in a passive-aggressive fashion. I understand this. I am at peace with this. 

But I must ask. I must ask what it is that compelled you to rocket around my little car with the rumble of the God of Thunder and cut me off in the drive thru line? What treasure did these Golden Arches possess that must be pursued with such vigor? Are the chicken nuggets in the Falcon Heights McDonalds made of gold? If you are 45 seconds later to the drive-thru window, will your QVC polyester relaxation pants no longer fit snugly to your bottom? 

I don't mean to make an issue of this. As I said, I am at peace. This is Minnesota. You will drive with hellacious fire, and then you will smile and say, "You betcha!" with the glow of a thousand winter suns. When Minnesotans are birthed from their lakeshore muskrat holes each spring, they are endowed with certain inalienable rights. I know this. As a simple Irish girl from California, your ways are mysterious to me. I seek only to broaden my understanding.

Love and Kisses,
Susan
There are two ways you can use this writing prompt. One, actually do some writing, and two, head straight for the fridge and procrastinate.  Your choice.

Fiction: your character has a sudden need for a snack. Take this as far as it will go. If in nature, small rodents are acceptable. If in the city, larger rodents may be more commonly available. Or choose your own snack.

Nonfiction: If looking for a topic, find a snack food in the supermarket, and research its history. If possible, connect this snack food to your own life. Then eat several portions of the snack food and see if anything comes to you. If nothing does, go to the gym and work out until the snack food is no longer attached to your hips.

Below: giraffe snacking at the Minnesota Zoo last week. Giraffe in question was brought here via specialized Giraffe Truck, which apparently is an actual thing. Giraffe enjoys eating giraffe biscuits fed to him by tourists for $2.50 each. Giraffe goes back to warmer climes during the winter due to Minnesota's general incompatibility with Giraffes.

minnesota zoo giraffe summer 2009.jpg

Floral displays

| 1 Comment
with spring still blooming here in Minnesota, I caught some pics of local flowers at Coon Rapids Regional Park in Anoka County, North of the Twin Cities. The park has miles of bike trails through mature oak woodlands as well as along the Mississippi river.

minnesota pink shrub 6.jpg
minnesota pink shrub 9.jpg

Character study

| 2 Comments
Today the family and I took a nice walk through a local park, and it was a lovely sunny day. The river flowed smooth and dark between edges of green spring trees. In the forest itself, the leaves are still a lighter, fresher green, as here in Minnesota spring is still underway and summer has not quite arrived.

At the riverside visitor's center I paused with my mother's corgi while mother took a quick bathroom break. Nearby, a clean-cut man in his thirties sat with an unusually large brown pit bull.  He started chatting with me. "People think these dogs are vicious," he said in a pronounced southern drawl, patting his enormous pit bull on its flat head.  "But it's just the training. It's like with guns. Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well all right, I thought, people kill people with guns. But that's neither here nor there. "She's a sweetheart," he said.  "Never had any problems."  I made some sort of comment about how even corgis can get a little grumpy sometimes (anyone who has tried to separate a corgi from a pork chop can attest to that) but their smaller jaws made them a bit less lethal. 

And then the fellow opened up. "Oh yeah," he said, "Those jaws, they lock on and they just don't let go. She's two for two. Took apart a rottweiler."

"A rottweiler?"

"Yeah, guy brought over a rottweiler, and she ripped her up, they took the dog to the university and they worked on her all day but there wasn't anything they could do."

It was then I understood that I was being visited by a stranger from an alternate universe, one free of irony or logical malfunctions. I scooted the corgi a couple of feet to the left.  "Wow,"  I said, and as Mom emerged from the bathrooms off we went.  

I've been sweating through a semester-long class and now that it's over, I feel like I've been let out of the fields and allowed a glass of lemonade.  The blog has taken a backseat to the work, unfortunately. But here I am, ready for summer.

Yesterday here in the Twin Cities we had an unusual weather day: hours and hours and hours of 40 mph winds in 95 degree heat. It was as if Minneapolis had been put under a hair dryer, and all the trees and blades of grass began to wither as the wind went on and on and on.  The flags at my office, all relatively new, shredded at the ends by afternoon.

When I moved to Minnesota from Northern California four years ago, Dad and I drove the 2,000 miles across the great American West and encountered our share of wind. By far the windiest place was wyoming, where it seemed everywhere we stopped had a steady 30-50mph wind, everpresent, unrelenting.  The grass seemed short and the ladscape relatively treeless. Beautiful and stark and dotted with antelope who didn't seem to mind the wind. Perhaps Antelope are just too fast to be bothered by it.

Before our hot wind arrived this week, I had a lovely day at Snail Lake Regional Park in Shoreview, Minnesota. The park contains several reservoirs for the City of St. Paul and families hugged the shoreline, fishing in the clear lakes.

lake vadnais water house2.jpg
The parks along the lakeshores were green on blue. This is Sucker Lake...which oddly, does not suck.

Sucker Lake park area.jpg

Muskrat Butt

| Click here to post a comment
Been buried in a memoir project for two weeks...generating lots of material, but also neglecting the blog. So here's a muskrat near my house last year to keep you company while I work my way out from under my pile of stuff to do.

muskrat butt.jpg

I was surfing the net today and re-discovered the delightful Roadside America site, which meticulously catalogs all the oddball attractions the American people have created to draw interest to their towns and neighborhoods.  Writers are always looking things to inspire the written word, but what if your writer's block is really, really bad?

Well, go to Roadsideamerica.com and find a giant fiberglass wonder near you. Go there. Sit under it. If nothing comes to you, at least you can write a pithy essay on the experience. If you sit next to one of these things long enough, you're gonna see SOMETHING worth writing about.

Oh, and don't miss Roadside America's hilarious blog.

Here's the most recent one of these monuments to American culture that I found: 

garrison walleye.jpg
Oddly, according to Roadside America there is some controversy over the Garrison, MN giant fiberglass walleye, as there is another town named Garrison in North Dakota that has one too. Both towns claim to be the "Walleye Capitol of the World". I was unaware of this dispute when I casually posed before the Minnesota walleye. Walleye, for those of you from elsewhere, is the native fish of the north country, a mild white fish that fries up just nicely. 

Not content to take the usual tourist shot, I decided to get "artistic" with the giant fiberglass fish and focus on its awe-inspiring head.

garrison walleye closeup head.jpg
See the mighty fish struggle for breath! The temperature is about 5 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a bit chilly for a fish.  But we must consider yet another view.

garrison walleye closeup tail.jpg
Yes, the tail, and in the background, the frozen lake, and the shoreline of Bemidji, and the wistful dreams of all Walleye hanging with the ice-fog on the distant shore...ooooooh, SO much bad writing can come out of a fiberglass fish. Excellent.

Red Rocks

| Click here to post a comment
Another pic from my January Arizona trip. This is Bell Rock, near Sedona.  It was about 60 degrees, crystal blue sky, and not terribly crowded.  When the sloppy wet snowstorm hits Minnesota some time today I'll stare at this picture to regather my mental health.

sedona bell rock.jpg

Reading the Redwoods

| 2 Comments
As part of a nonfiction project, I've scoured the used booksellers of the internet and collected about 10 books about the history, ecology, and culture of the coastal redwood regions of California.  As someone who split her childhood between the two great coastal redwood regions of the state - the Santa Cruz Mountains and the North Coast - I find it interesting how small the populations are that actually live there. It's a good thing, of course. Too many people spoil the trees, I think. But going through these books, many of the names are familiar to my mother or I, and every single photograph is a place I've been. 

The reading list is enticing, and if I didn't already have a lot of reading for a class, I'd be completely submerged in redwoods by now. First up: "Coast Redwood: A Natural and Cultural History," a beautiful full color book with a more scientific bent about the great trees. Then the Save-the-Redwoods-League's "The Redwood Forest" edited by Reed F. Noss. My great-uncle was chairman of that organization for a number of years, and that volume will likely include more details of the long, hard fight to save places that most Americans would be shocked were ever threatened. Then on to the more recent "The Wild Trees" by Richard Preston, a best seller celebrated in the New Yorker which follows the work of a tree biologist in the canopy of the tallest trees of the North Coast.  I got a steal on "Giants in the Earth" edited by Peter Johnstone, a compendium of all the literature ever written on the redwoods - fiction, nonfiction, Muir to Keruoac. $7.50 for a fresh copy discarded by the Antelope Library in California. And then "Conifers of California", by Ronald M. Lanner,  another full-color delight with Audubon-style illustrations of all of California's amazing collection of trees.  

And so I now have a nice collection of works on the redwood coasts. But all these books pre-date the final settlement of the north coast timber wars last year, and with things looking decidedly more optimistic for redwood conservation now than they have in decades, the tone of some of these books might be jarring. There was a long, long time when it seemed like most of nature would have to be lost. It was inconceivable when I was a child that the people who founded the Gap would come in and buy out Charles Hurwitz, ending his destruction of both forests and communities. But there it is.  

Finding a subject about which you desperately want to write, and making yourself an expert on it, seems like as good a path forward as any for a writer. I'm not sure about "write what you know", but "write what you are familiar with, but about which you feel you don't know enough" seems more the thing. More updates as I find my way through these books over the next few months.

Below: Redwoods on clifftops overlook Gold Bluffs Beach, Humboldt County, California. Roosevelt Elk graze at center.

gold bluffs beach.jpg

Welcome to Northern Word, the online home of writer Susan McNerney. Northern Word features lots of photography, words on the business and process of writing, original bits of fiction and nonfiction, travelogues and travel writing, and anything else that Susan feels like posting. Browse the categories on the left (or the topic cloud below) to see previous episodes, and don't miss the two big travelogues: A Week in Rome and A Great Southwest Road Trip. Susan is originally from the redwood regions of Northern California, but now lives and writes in chilly Minnesota.

New! Follow Susan on Twitter and get notified of updates to Northern Word, as well as other curious things.

All images on Northern Word are under copyright (see Creative Commons license linked below). Want to use one of these pics? Feel free to drop me an email at mackerelstreet ((at )) gmail (( dot ) com.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.