Thursday, September 13, 2012

Race Hotel


Alright, so I am frugal – and I am not ashamed to admit it J When Ryan and I go up to Disneyland, we always drive back home. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, we live about 45 minutes away, so it is hard for us to justify spending the money on the hotel room when we can just drive and sleep in our own bed. Next, since we have annual passes, we will normally go up and just spend a couple hours at the park [another reason why I LOVE the annual passes, because you don’t feel like you have to jam pack everything into one day and stay from open to close when you are dropping $90 a person on the ticket], so we normally aren’t too tired or anything and can manage driving home.



A couple years ago we were gifted a couple nights of hotel stay up at Disney for an anniversary gift. It was the year that Disney was doing the promotion that you got in FREE on your birthday. At that point we had our annual passes, so if you went on your birthday they would give you a gift card for the amount of the pass (I think at that point it was just the single park admission and it was like a gift card of like $67 – not too shabby). We used the hotel stay over the weekend of our birthdays and had a great time. Other than that I think we had only stayed up there one other time, and it might have been before we had passes and it was because we were going to go all day and wanted to get up there super early (I am like a kid when it comes to Disney… don’t make fun J ).



Well, when the information about my race came out, and they said that we should be at the starting line at 4:45am, I decided that we should probably just stay the night before. If not, we would have had to leave around 3:30 or earlier (because I would never want to risk running late for it), which means we would have been up around 2:30am or so!



As I mentioned before, since we live so close to the parks, it is hard for me to justify a hotel room, let alone an expensive one. Since I knew we would really only be using the room to sleep (and not even that long since we are out of there by 4:30am), I looked up a cheap hotel that was still in walking distance to the park. The reason I wanted it walking distance was because I didn’t want to have to deal with parking a car down there, pay for the parking, etc, with all of the race participants, closed roads, etc. Also, I wanted it close enough so that we didn’t have to walk super far after I had already run 13.1 miles.


We found a hotel (or maybe it was actually considered a motel J) online and I booked the room. Ryan and I got up there around noon on Saturday. We pulled in and went to check in. I honestly had to try not to laugh when we checked in. The gentleman didn’t have anything in a computer system. He pulled out a little slip of paper and had us fill out our contact information with a pencil. Then he asked to see Ryan’s drivers license, looked at it, and gave it back. Then he went into a drawer and pulled out TWO remotes. He hands them over to Ryan and says ‘This one for sound. This one for power and channel.’. Then he went into another drawer, said we would be in room 210, and got out a box of these old keys. These were the plastic card keys, BUT THEY HAD HOLES DRILLED IN THEM IN THE PATTERN FOR THE SPECIFIC LOCK!  I felt like I was in the 1960s or something.



Thankfully we really were only in the hotel room for a short period  of time (mostly to watch Michigan lose the football game and then to ‘sleep’ before the race). I know, I know, you get what you pay for, and since we paid little WE GOT LITTLE J . Lesson learned…

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