No Soap Radio
Written: Feb 23 '07 (Updated Feb 23 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Free wireless Internet, extensive cable offerings, close to the slopes. And Tara.
Cons: No restaurant, no elevator, sometimes no soap. Hairballs in the pool.
The Bottom Line: During the off season, I imagine the Comfort Inn can provide adequate accommodations, especially if Tara is on duty. As for me? Frankly, my dear, I shan't be back.
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| theeye's Full Review: Comfort Inn Heart Of The Poconos |
No Soap Radio, or: As God Is My Witness, I'll Never Be Hungry Again
It is entirely to the credit of Tara, the intrepid hotel manager on duty this past President's Weekend, that the Discomfort Inn of the Heartless Poconos has eked out a second star from this reviewer. I would not be surprised to learn that she is, even now, gamely manning her post at the front desk while stitching the hotel draperies into ballroom gowns for the hapless remaining guests.
We had planned our short visit to the Camelback ski area rather hastily. As it was the week of school break and the busiest ski weekend of the year, most of the local hotels, including the Chateau Resort we had stayed at two years previous, were fully booked. With few options, we made a reservation at The Comfort Inn / Heart of the Poconos. It was only five miles from Camelback, reasonably priced and had free wireless Internet. There were only smoking rooms available, but beggars can't be choosers.
Around 11pm on Saturday night, after a two hour drive from Manhattan, we arrived at the hotel with three suitcases (crammed with cold weather gear, books and toys), a laptop and a sleeping six-year-old in tow. (Dreadfully inefficient, I realize, but the hasty planning had culminated in hasty packing and we were, after all, driving right to the hotel, so over-packing was no big deal. Or so we thought.)
My husband went inside to register us and returned to the car with an annoyed scowl. Our room was on the second (and uppermost) floor and the hotel had no elevator. (They did have a luggage cart, much good though that did us.) As my husband lugged the suitcases up the stairs, I coaxed our son into semi-consciousness and he obliged us by sleepwalking himself up the stairs and into the hotel room.
The room itself seemed perfectly adequate. We were pleasantly surprised to find no trace of cigarette smoke. The furnishings were typical and serviceable: two full-size beds, a dresser with four nicely sized drawers, one nightstand and a small round table with two chairs and a coffee maker with complimentary provisions. Several lamps provided adequate lighting; the one small window had no view to speak of. A safe was provided in the closet. The bathroom was a bit cramped, but clean and equipped with a working hair dryer. All we wanted was a place to crash at night and this seemed to fit the bill.
It might seem hardly worth remarking that the bathroom also featured the usual complement of clean towels of various sizes, two wrapped bars of soap and a vial each of conditioning shampoo and body lotion. Those items would, however, become quite remarkable indeed before our visit concluded. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Before tumbling into bed, my son (who had predictably perked up long enough to explore his new surroundings) established that the hotel had excellent cable TV offerings, including not just one, but several kiddie networks which met with his approval. In the bathroom, he noted with satisfaction that he could read most of the very big words on the little sign, propped up next to the aforementioned soap and shampoo, which offered complimentary toiletry items to guests who had forgotten to pack them. (This sign did not seem quite so amusing then as it does now in retrospect.)
The wireless Internet worked like a charm that first night; the login procedure was trivial and quick and the connection was strong and problem-free. Unfortunately, along with nearly everything else about our hotel stay, our connectivity experience went downhill from there: on subsequent nights, the connection was weak and dropped every few minutes.
On Sunday morning, I arose first and headed to the shower. The water pressure and temperature seemed fine at first. Then I noticed a brownish pool developing on the tub floor. The fully-occupied hotel had apparently strained the hot water tank's capacity and I hastened to finish my ablutions with increasingly sediment-filled and rapidly cooling water. My husband chose to forego a shower altogether and I instructed my son to use bottled water rather than the sludge now emerging from the sink's faucet.
We were, as you might well imagine, less than enthralled with the Comfort Inn by now. Still, it was President's Weekend, by far the busiest time of the year at Camelback, the hotel was packed with early risers heading for the slopes and we took it on faith that the Comfort Inn wasn't always like that.
Downstairs we checked out the complimentary continental breakfast, which I understand is an important -- nay, absolutely essential -- element of any hotel review. On a normal weekend, I imagine the little kitchenette-like breakfast nook is not quite so crowded as we found it, though just as drearily utilitarian in decor. In addition to Corn Flakes and Fruit Loops (or their generic lookalikes) and an unappetizing selection of ersatz bagels and pastry-like objects, they had several do-it-yourself waffle irons turning out perfectly nice waffles. The coffee was surprisingly good. Tea bags were available but hot water was nowhere to be found; my husband poured some hot coffee into his bowl of instant oatmeal flakes and had caffeine and fiber in one convenient and oddly satisfying serving.
I presume that the breakfast was essentially identical on subsequent mornings, but I do not know that from personal experience. After the first morning, we skipped the continental breakfast in favor of getting the hell out of that hotel as quickly as possible.
After a day on the slopes, during which my son demonstrated that his roller-blading prowess translated brilliantly into downhill skiing (the kid is a natural), we tried to find a suitable place nearby for some dinner. The Comfort Inn, you see, has no restaurant whatsoever aside from what passes for breakfast. Nothing. Nada. As it turns out, for reasons unlikely to apply to most of my readers and clearly not the fault of the Comfort Inn, we found that not one of the half dozen or so places we stopped at that night had anything we could eat. (If you must know, we keep kosher with a moderate degree of strictness.) So we headed back to the hotel, planning to nosh on whatever we had brought from home, supplemented by anything we could score from the hotel vending machines.
Upon returning to the room, my son announced his need to use the facilities. (I will spare you the overly precise formulation he uses for that announcement.) A few minutes later, he reported with great consternation that he could not find the soap. (My son, you see, has been properly instructed in the importance of personal hygiene.)
I joined him in the tiny bathroom and found that the bar of soap that had been next to the sink in the morning was gone. So was the bar of soap that had been in the shower. The shampoo was gone, too. And the little tray on the counter was empty as well.
More than a little irritated, I picked up the phone and dialed the front desk.
We have no soap. They took it all away and didn't replace it.
I paused, momentarily and irrationally expecting the sort of response one would get at a full-service hotel, if such a thing could ever happen at a full-service hotel. Instead of an apology and an assurance that someone would deliver me some soap at once, however, what the calm and pleasant voice on the other end of the phone said was: Oh. Oh dear. Um. Okay, you need soap. I need to run out to get some things for some other guests. It will take about twenty minutes. Would, um, would that be okay?
I was now flabbergasted. Are you telling me that there's no soap in the entire hotel? If you have one bar of soap, I'd be happy to come down to the front desk myself and get it.
With my son still in the bathroom, assiduously avoiding touching anything, I ran down the stairs to the front desk. There I had my first real in-person encounter with Tara. She's a genuinely pleasant, sweet, earnest young woman who was quite obviously doing her unflappable best to manage an unmanageable situation. As I approached the desk, she was calmly taking phone calls from obviously unhappy guests, while rapidly and efficiently folding towels from an enormous pile of presumably clean laundry arrayed on the table behind her. A small group of unhappy-looking guests congregated in front of the desk.
As soon as I could get a word in edgewise, I asked her incredulously if she were the only person on duty in the entire hotel on the busiest weekend of the year. With a rueful smile, she nodded. This is what I came into this morning, she said, handing me a bar of soap and handing newly folded towels to several guests who, it would appear, were missing more than soap in their rooms.
I delivered the single, precious bar of soap to my relieved son and we all changed into bathing suits, at The Kid's enthusiastic urging. Realizing at the last moment that the chances of there being any clean towels at the pool were a lot closer to 'none' than to 'slim', I left the boys at poolside and headed over to visit Tara again. I had not quite reached the front desk when she spotted me and anticipated my request. You'll be needing towels for the pool. How many do you need?, she asked with only the slightest hint of a wince.
Well, there are three of us. Could we get ... three?, I asked apologetically.
Follow me, she replied briskly and led me back to the laundry room. She pushed the door open with considerable effort as the room was literally filled with huge clear plastic bags of linens. I watched as she climbed over the bags with remarkable and unselfconscious agility and made her way to the driers, pulling out three newly laundered towels. Grateful for the effort, I hadn't the heart to point out that one of them was a face towel; it would serve well enough for The Kid.
The indoor pool, in a room with three glass external walls, was nicely heated at its depths, but chilled at the drafty surface. After splashing about for a while, my husband spotted some floating hair balls in the main pool and we all decided to repair to the hot tub instead. There were quite a few guests in both pools and the general topic of conversation was the scarcity of clean towels and general lack of services, though Tara had managed to charm most of the guests into a charitable resignation.
Back in the room, I confirmed that we still had no hot water in the shower and resigned myself to spending the night with chlorine-scented hair. But first, I wanted to visit the vending machine, our last best hope for some nighttime nourishment. I was apparently not alone in this venture: the machine was very nearly empty. Previous ravenous hordes had pressed the machine's buttons with such urgency that the letters and numbers had become largely illegible and I had to guess which buttons to press. Sadly, my first guess was off the mark and all I got for my dollar was the sight of an empty rack rolling forward to no avail. My second dollar sent a granola bar inching forward, but the rack stopped short, leaving the object of my desire dangling just out of reach. Banging the side of the machine had no effect. Cursing, I tried a third dollar and hit pay dirt: two granola bars!
The soda machine was all sold out, so we rationed the bottled water we had in the room as we dined on the meager gleanings I had coaxed out of the snack machine and the provisions we had brought from home. We spent much of the evening scanning the restaurant section of the Yellow Pages. Smuggler's Cove, just down the road, sounded promising and we resolved to try it the following night. (It was, in fact, just the ticket, with a nice salad bar and a harried waitress who seemed inordinately grateful for our patience as she struggled with the unusually large crowd. We could not have been more grateful ourselves.)
We stayed at the Comfort Inn through Tuesday morning and the rest of our experience, once our expectations had been suitably lowered, was not bad. We never did get any more soap, but at least they didn't confiscate that one bar. (Each time we returned to the room, we checked for it immediately.) No more shampoo ever arrived, but we used a little sample packet we had packed for emergencies; by Monday morning, the hot water had returned and the shower was usable again. The wireless Internet never regained the strength it had the first night, but I was able to check my email and accomplish what I needed to. The mattress was a bit lumpy to my princess-and-the-pea standards, but my husband and son slept well.
On Tuesday morning, we packed up our three suitcases and bumped them down the stairs. Tara was still there at the front desk; I briefly wondered whether she had ever slept. Since leaving our bags with the concierge was manifestly not an option, we packed everything into the trunk of the car and headed for our last day at the slopes without a backward glance.
If you avoid the height of President's weekend, I imagine the Comfort Inn will provide basic accommodations that are acceptable. Whatever the timing of your visit, if Tara is on duty, I imagine that the situation will be better than it would have been otherwise. Still, all things considered, we'll make our plans earlier next time and stay at the Chateau instead -- in relative Comfort.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
theeye
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Location: New York, NY (it's a hell of a town!)
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 165 members
About Me:
Company president, math geek, first time mom at 39, epinion addict. Sleep? Not lately.
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