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We took a long weekend to visit relatives in central Minnesota.

Day 1

Get to Chicago. Nothing fancy here.

Stayed at a Hyatt Place because I thought Hyatts were supposed to be nice. It was okay, but we we not impressed. In fact, we were so unimpressed that we cancelled our reservation for the trip back. There wasn’t anything necessarily wrong, other than the carpet in our room looked dirty.

But that’s what turned my wife against the hotel. In the morning, just before we were checking out, she stopped at the front desk to let them know the carpet looked bad. The guy at the front desk told her two things: “That’s not the room you were assigned at booking.” and “If you had let us know earlier, we could have given you a different room.” He was defensive and hostile, which is a bad tone for someone in the hospitality industry. The main reason why we felt like switching hotels was his first statement. He never asked for her name or room number, and he never touched his computer. How did he know what room we were in and what room we were originally assigned? He didn’t. He was just trying excuses.

Day 2

Leaving Chicago took longer than expected. I-90 was under construction for all of Illinois, so instead of going around 70 MPH, we spent our morning going 40 MPH. For about 50 miles. They didn’t have enough crews and equipment to work on 50 miles of road at once. Rather than break the huge job into manageable sections and close only as much road as they can work on at once, they shifted traffic over, tore up all 50 miles of road, and now are rebuilding the road – presumably waiting to reopen any lanes until the whole thing is done.

We were going to stop for lunch in Eau Claire, but we made worse time than we had expected so we stopped for lunch in Wisconsin Dells – Buffalo Phil’s, which the kids had fondly remembered from our trip there a few years ago.
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