Joy and rapture are mine beyond all belief. I have written two rants in less than 20 days. A-ma-zing. Well, now let's end this Chicago subplot. Oh and for those of you who just CAN NOT get enough of me I have started a little online journal that deal with more daily random stuff and not any of these uhm...well I guess you could call them "essays". Anyway.

Realized I forgot to mention all the lovely hotels we stayed at...heh heh heh. First off was one of the lovely Best Westerns. With no working ice machines after the second day. Not like they had that many...only three for a 8 or so storey hotel. And I don't know, maybe it's a western thing, but even moderate hotels out here tend to have mini-fridges and microwaves. We stayed at a decent Best Western and a "Nice" hotel and no mini-fridge. No microwave. But if you have a creative mind you can reheat pizza with a coffee maker. Heh.

Next we stayed at a place called the hotel 71. This was our "nice" hotel. At least they had a working ice machine. They also kept ice buckets by the machine so you could take three or four back to your room to make a fridge out of the garbage can and the bathtub. They had a "mini bar" but you couldn't use that fridge for your own stuff. Wouldn't have been so bad but the sodas cost like $3. For a can. Of pepsi. As if they really expect people to say "oh I'm staying at a rather high end hotel, I'll just stay here and pay $3 for a can of soda ignoring the fact that there's a store ONE FREAKIN' BLOCK AWAY where I can buy 5 times that many for $3." Idiots. That and they had lost our reservation, and the bellhop kept dancing around waiting for his tip. Whatever. At least we got a room. Though it was decorated in hideous oranges and yellows. Really, we didn't get anything more there than we had at the best western. A little more room but otherwise, had a bed, chair, desk, lamp, cofee maker, and hair dryer. The bed was a LITTLE nicer...but really...biggest benefit was the working ice machines.

Now let's go on with the rest of our adventure.

So we left Chicago by train heading for Nebraska (okay, originally we had intended to drive from Nebraska to visit my family...but due to other circumstances we'd had to see them earlier that year so we decided just to spend more time in Chicago instead...uhm...it ALL made sense at the time...) We had got ourselves a sleeper car room, it was nice, at the train station they had free sodas and coffees for the sleeper car passengers. And they had free sodas and water on the train. We got treated better on the train than at our "nice hotel" and we paid less for the privilege. We also got a free dinner. We had steak, admittedly it wasn't great steak, but it was pretty good considering. So it actually evened out, because had we eaten that on the train we would have paid the same, and not had a bed. Of course the beds weren't that great but I didn't expect much. Oh, and during our free dinner the train hit a car. Yes, hit a car, and yes, someone died. So we had to wait for another two hours. It was kinda weird.

So we get to Nebraska at like 2 or something in the morning...and...uhm...we're at a train station in Nebraska at 2. So we decide...uhm...we decided to go to the airport to get a hotel. Yes, we decided to go to the airport to get a hotel. It made sense at the time. It's 2 AM you expect well thought out plans? We hoped to use the courtesy phones to call a hotel with a shuttle (running at 2am) and then stay there until 2 the next afternoon (around the time we needed to get BACK to the airport. We didn't want to keep taking cabs...cabs are freaky. So we call like every hotel with a shuttle that looks within our price range. Find one that actually runs its shuttle, and will let you check in, at TWO A. M. (surprisingly not many.) ironically it was one of the cheapest hotels that still had a running shuttle. Of course it took a while for it to end up getting there...so we're taking turns waiting in the snow for the shuttle to take us to the hotel. So we end up at this little...comfort inn or something. Now, maybe it's a little much to ask, but why do bigger cities not have hotels with free continental breakfasts? This cheapest hotel we'd stayed at yet had a continental breakfast with danishes, cereal, basic fruits, oatmeals, toasts, and juices. I had to PAY for continental breakfast at the Best Western in Chicago, only thing better was they had more tropical fruits. Of course maybe I'm spoiled by Arizona and California where you can pretty much get strawberries and pineapples year round anyway... but anyway. So free breakfast, cheap place to sleep (that wasn't any more uncomfortable than the more expensive best western...with broken ice machines...)and vending machines with sodas under $3. You know, charging more for something doesn't make it worth more, it just makes you stupid. Hotels are not planes, you are not a prisoner, there is NO excuse for charging $3 for a soda.

Freaks.