6-20-2015 MSRA Back To The 50s Cruise-In

6-20-2015 ST. PAUL, MN

A little about our hotel, the Crowne Plaza.  First, maybe with a little more research, we could have been closer strategically to this, that or them.  Instead, we chose a hotel located right on the Mississippi River,

View of Ol' Miss from our room

consequently a bit far from just about everything and everybody and whose access was troubled by a lot of construction, both in the hotel and on the local streets.  Nevertheless, it was a very nice place with many great big, seriously huge, fat towels and doovays and pillows completely stuffed with down-doobie-doo-down-down.  This fit in nicely with the cruise-in theme, of course, and by the hour I submerged myself in heavenly fluff.

I'm in there somewhere

We requested a room up higher in the hotel so as to escape the road construction equipment, jackhammers, and so forth, as recommended in the reviews.

The hotel is aging a little and floor plans in the rooms are a bit tight but we managed just fine.  Once again, they provided one of those coffee makers that makes one, count it, one cup in a row.  Fortunately, we packed our own 4-cupper and lots and lots of coffee.  The parking garage was a little on the scary side, dark and rundown, and so we allowed the nice valet guys to take care of that job.  So all things considered, it was a most pleasant stay.

Except for one thing:  as requested, we were situated high up, on the 13th floor.  Odd for a hotel, we thought.  Nobody that we ever knew had a 13th floor.  Well, OK, that’s just a bunch of superstitious malarkey anyhow, right?  Not so fast!

On Saturday night, well, really Sunday morning at 1:30AM, an alarm went off on speakers in our room.  A nice lady’s voice said that there has been a fire alert in the hotel.  “Please evacuate immediately using the stairwells, not the elevators,” she said.  We dressed, Rob grabbed a few things and we stepped into a very smoky hallway!  I myself didn’t think it smelled like smoke but it was certainly a heavy haze.  Thanks to Rob’s flashlight, we found the stairwell and began the hike down 13 flights.  We arrived on the lobby level and many people were running here and there like chickens with their heads cut off.  “Oh, this is easy,” I thought.  “I know this one:  go outside.”  Duh.  That was smart but here’s the dumb part.  I dressed and walked out of the room.  I didn’t grab my purse, my laptop, the contents of the safe, a bottle of water, nothing.  What an idiot!  You often think about what you would do in an emergency but apparently, what you actually do instead is another thing altogether.

Once outside, I saw four ladder trucks and an ambulance.  I learned that the hotel was trying to relocate the guests to other hotels but because of the cruise-in, every mouse hole in town was occupied.  Oh great.  My money, cards and all the rest are going to perish in a fire and I’m going to sleep broke and homeless on a St. Paul park bench.  I hate my life.

So here is how this all shook down.  A drunken member of a wedding party decided to dick around with the fire extinguisher and detonate it.  All this took place where?  Yup.  The 13th floor.  The mist from the extinguisher set the rest in motion.  In the lobby cafeteria we found a group that had ordered some pizzas.  They couldn’t eat it all and so offered several pieces still in the box to my beloved.  He was delighted and gleeful!  So during our emergency, Rob sat quietly eating pizza.  When, at 2:30AM, they finally announced we could go back to our rooms, he whined, “But wait a minute, I’m not done!”  Life is just full of important choices!

So at last, we were supposed to board the freight elevator and ride back to the 13th floor and go to sleep.