Our trip home from Texas on December 29 was uneventful…until we tried to drive out of Long term Parking Lot E.

The flights had been on time, except for a30-minute glitch in Baltimore when the flight crew couldn’t find “Thomas Lister”, a wheelchair passenger who was nowhere to be found. Naturally Southwest didn’t want to leave a disabled passenger stranded in the terminal, so an extensive search was instigated. 

They never found him. I hope he’s okay.

The flight from Baltimore was fast, our one suitcase arrived in a timely manner, we caught the shuttle bus to the parking lot and actually found our car despite the fact that it was almost 8:00 PM and very dark.

It wasn’t until we were driving toward the exit gates that I said, “What is that noise?? Do we have a flat tire or is it the road?”

Banjo Man pulled over to look.

“It’s a flat tire,” he announced, getting back into the car.

Uh-oh.

We drove closer to the exit gates and parked off to the side under a light. I called AAA while Banjo Man dug out the warm clothes we keep in the car for emergencies.

An hour or so later AAA arrived. A nice young man named Anthony proceeded to wrangle the spare from under the car and remove the flat tire. Putting the spare on turned out to be a complicated project. Anthony didn’t think it fit well enough for us to drive the 40 minutes home. He wanted us to tow the car to a tire store to be fixed in the morning, but it was now almost 11:00. 

I suggested we just go to a nearby hotel and deal with the tire in the morning. Anthony reluctantly agreed that we could drive a mile around the airport to the Hampton Inn.

We’d stayed at this Hampton several times, when we’d had early flights the next morning and the weather was iffy or we wanted to leave the car there. I had no hesitation about staying there again.

Boy, was I wrong.

Here’s the review I left on TripAdvisor:

This hotel has really gone downhill. We stayed here at the last minute due to car trouble after our plane landed. Couldn’t drive home, so picked the closest hotel at 11 PM on a cold winter night. Staff was pleasant, but there was a guy sleeping in his car next to ours and waiting his turn for a shower inside. In the morning we saw derelicts hanging out in front of the door, homeless people being brought in for a hot breakfast, a security guard doing his best to keep them out, and other strange things that made me think someone had a system inside the hotel. The whole place needs to be vacuumed, the sink was plugged, our room had two bath towels, two wash cloths, one hand towel and one bar of soap. The bathroom door wouldn’t close. I tried to make coffee and the machine shot out God knows what kind of dirt. The chairs in the breakfast room should be in the dumpster. I am actually not a fussy person, but we stay in 20-30 hotel rooms each year on road trips and I’ve never seen anything like this from a Hilton hotel. 

It was actually worse than that, with the drug addicts hanging out around the front door and a security guard ordering a reluctant cleaner to mop up their mess so customers could walk in and out.

I watched the feed-the-addicts show from the breakfast room while Banjo Man was down the street getting a new tire. When we checked out I asked the receptionist if they were housing the homeless now (which is happening in many hotels in RI), which would be a good thing to know in the future.

She looked aghast. ”Absolutely not! I call the police all the time!”

Hmmmmm…

Banjo Man, who had been in and out of the lobby and the parking area several times that morning, said that he hadn’t felt safe. It was weird and unusual to experience that in the suburbs. We weren’t deep into the city, by any means.

We couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Sunday morning I checked reviews of this hotel on Tripadvisor. Sure enough, the most recent reviews were negative. I wish I’d read them Friday night, but it was a good lesson: even if you’re cold and tired, take a few extra minutes and pull up reviews on your phone before heading to a hotel, even one you’ve stayed at before.

But the good news? We arrived in Rhode Island to bare roads and 40 degree temps. No wind, no rain, no traffic. Best of all, no snow!