Hotels

Well, Patti's turned out to be the exception to the rule.

The rule is that, if it costs less than $40, you don't want to stay there. One place we stayed (I think it was in Cleveland TN), charged $40 if we paid cash, and $42 if we used the card. We should have left.

We actually became connoisseurs of cheap hotels. They have to pass the shampoo test.

REALLY cheap hotels don't provide shampoo at all. Cheap hotels give you shampoo in a plastic packet (like ketchup) that has to have the corner gnawed off. I'm pretty sure it's Suave in the packet. The next step up is White Rain in a bottle, and additional bottles containing conditioner and lotion. It is, by the way, very easy to mistake the one for the other when not wearing your glasses. Just sayin'.

A mid-priced place will have Pantene.

The main difference between the Comfort Inn, where I am tonight, for my last night out, and the Marriott (which cost over three times as much), besides the free washer and dryer, is the shampoo. The Marriott has this cool ginger-citrus scented stuff that really is worth taking with. Of course, they were a bit stingy with it, so all I had left was the lotion, but it's really nice.

Everything else in the bathroom--towels, bath mats, tissues--was pretty much equal.

Now, mattresses are another story. Most places seem to favour very hard beds, and only one, a Ramada, had a really nice pillow-top. That hotel was going through an extensive remodelling, so new mattresses may have been part of that. They had new flat-screen TVs, too.

One place had pillows that completely rejected my head.

All in all, I miss my memory foam mattress pad.