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A room of one's own
Jun. 8th, 2018 10:36 amSpent a bunch of time on chat-relay with Priceline Customer Service the last two days, trying to sort out my housing for the upcoming sale in Edmonds. Somehow, though I'd specified a non-smoking, accessible room at the hotel--the Days Inn by Wyndham in Aurora, a north Seattle neighborhood--the confirmation came back for a smoking room. Which my asthma will not tolerate.
Hence the long sessions with Priceline.
When we first started doing out-of-town shows, we were generally broke, and never sanguine about how our sales would be. So we couch-surfed a lot. Denise has a cousin in Seattle who let us sleep on her sofa-bed for years, and we had friends in Portland and Bend with spare rooms to share. Nearer sales, we'd commute, driving the hour to hour-and-a-half each way, each day to Roseburg, Corvallis, Salem, Silverton. Still do some of that; on long summer days, it's just easier to sleep at home in our own bed with our own cats.
I started using Priceline at the advice of fellow potter Ken Standhardt, the first year I got into Clayfolk, in Medford. I was hoping he could hook me up with a local potter with a spare bed, but found out he just went online and bid for a place to stay. I tried it, found an affordable, not terribly shabby place at a reasonable proximity to the show, and have been using their service ever since.
The last few years, though, the deals have been getting... less deal-y? Hotel prices are going up, and fewer of them are willing to discount by more than five or ten bucks. What with the 24-hour delay built into the bidding process, it started to be easier, certainly faster, to just pick a not-too-awful place and price and book direct. Particularly as we got more successful with our sales over the years.
But in my head, I'm still poor, still looking for a bargain. Lately, I've been experimenting with AirBnB, with mixed results. Tried it first during Anacortes, last year, and would up in a nice, quiet neighborhood in nearby Mt. Vernon. The only problem...
Well, look. When we go to an art fair, it's a business trip. We're in the booth long days, constantly on, interacting with customers. And neither of us is normally an extrovert. By the time we close the tent at 7 or 8 pm, we're wiped, no social graces left. We want to catch a supper, stumble home, and crash. We don't want to socialize. This is actually one of the reasons we stopped staying with people we knew. We felt like bad guests, bad friends. Going into a hotel room and hanging the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door was so much easier.
So our BnB host in Mt. Vernon was recently divorced, and it felt like he was trying to rebuild his social life through his guests, and his self-image by being the perfect host. He wanted to cook fancy, custom breakfasts, give tourist tips and advice, have long conversations after dinner. We just wanted dry cereal for breakfast, and room in the fridge for lunch meat and a carton of milk. He had a second guest to distract him for the first couple of days, but after she checked out, it was just us. I think we were a terrible disappointment to him.
We tried again this spring in Portland, during Ceramic Showcase; I scored a basement room for four days for barely over $100. What a deal, right?
It would have been perfect, had I been there solo. The place was a work-in-progress; they were funding renovations with their AirBnB proceeds. (The toilet broke down one evening, got pretty gross not being able to flush, but they had a replacement in the next day, had it installed shortly after we got back from the show.) Everybody in the house worked, so we hardly saw them. The basement was super-quiet, and nicely cool, though we had to turn off the plug-in air freshener. I'd rather do musty basement smell than heavy perfume. The big problem was the steps. Rough concrete, not very even or level, and no hand-rail.
I'm not terribly athletic, but I'm tall and reasonably fit, so managed all right. Denise is shorter, five years older, and has a family history of rheumatoid and osteo- arthritis. Those stairs were murder for her. She could just about manage them twice a day, coming up in the morning, going down again at night, if I carried her book bag. Needing the bathroom in the wee hours was almost more than she could handle.
So she decided that she was willing to pay extra, my next show, to stay in a hotel again. When I booked my room for Edmonds, they promised me a non-smoking, accessible room.
They lied.
It took a couple of tries for the Priceline Customer Service folks to get the truth out of them: that all their accessible rooms were already booked, and they didn't have any non-smoking rooms available for more than a day or two of our four-day stay. Priceline canceled the reservation for me, refunded the charge, and I went back online to look for another place, with six days to go.
Found one, too. My choices were all either in Renton, in deep southeast Seattle, or Everett, about 20 miles north, so I chose Everett. (Never choose to drive south Seattle if you don't have to.) Paid a little extra, about 9 bucks a night, for a non-smoking room.
And still saved nearly a hundred dollars over Lying Suites by Liars.
Hence the long sessions with Priceline.
When we first started doing out-of-town shows, we were generally broke, and never sanguine about how our sales would be. So we couch-surfed a lot. Denise has a cousin in Seattle who let us sleep on her sofa-bed for years, and we had friends in Portland and Bend with spare rooms to share. Nearer sales, we'd commute, driving the hour to hour-and-a-half each way, each day to Roseburg, Corvallis, Salem, Silverton. Still do some of that; on long summer days, it's just easier to sleep at home in our own bed with our own cats.
I started using Priceline at the advice of fellow potter Ken Standhardt, the first year I got into Clayfolk, in Medford. I was hoping he could hook me up with a local potter with a spare bed, but found out he just went online and bid for a place to stay. I tried it, found an affordable, not terribly shabby place at a reasonable proximity to the show, and have been using their service ever since.
The last few years, though, the deals have been getting... less deal-y? Hotel prices are going up, and fewer of them are willing to discount by more than five or ten bucks. What with the 24-hour delay built into the bidding process, it started to be easier, certainly faster, to just pick a not-too-awful place and price and book direct. Particularly as we got more successful with our sales over the years.
But in my head, I'm still poor, still looking for a bargain. Lately, I've been experimenting with AirBnB, with mixed results. Tried it first during Anacortes, last year, and would up in a nice, quiet neighborhood in nearby Mt. Vernon. The only problem...
Well, look. When we go to an art fair, it's a business trip. We're in the booth long days, constantly on, interacting with customers. And neither of us is normally an extrovert. By the time we close the tent at 7 or 8 pm, we're wiped, no social graces left. We want to catch a supper, stumble home, and crash. We don't want to socialize. This is actually one of the reasons we stopped staying with people we knew. We felt like bad guests, bad friends. Going into a hotel room and hanging the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door was so much easier.
So our BnB host in Mt. Vernon was recently divorced, and it felt like he was trying to rebuild his social life through his guests, and his self-image by being the perfect host. He wanted to cook fancy, custom breakfasts, give tourist tips and advice, have long conversations after dinner. We just wanted dry cereal for breakfast, and room in the fridge for lunch meat and a carton of milk. He had a second guest to distract him for the first couple of days, but after she checked out, it was just us. I think we were a terrible disappointment to him.
We tried again this spring in Portland, during Ceramic Showcase; I scored a basement room for four days for barely over $100. What a deal, right?
It would have been perfect, had I been there solo. The place was a work-in-progress; they were funding renovations with their AirBnB proceeds. (The toilet broke down one evening, got pretty gross not being able to flush, but they had a replacement in the next day, had it installed shortly after we got back from the show.) Everybody in the house worked, so we hardly saw them. The basement was super-quiet, and nicely cool, though we had to turn off the plug-in air freshener. I'd rather do musty basement smell than heavy perfume. The big problem was the steps. Rough concrete, not very even or level, and no hand-rail.
I'm not terribly athletic, but I'm tall and reasonably fit, so managed all right. Denise is shorter, five years older, and has a family history of rheumatoid and osteo- arthritis. Those stairs were murder for her. She could just about manage them twice a day, coming up in the morning, going down again at night, if I carried her book bag. Needing the bathroom in the wee hours was almost more than she could handle.
So she decided that she was willing to pay extra, my next show, to stay in a hotel again. When I booked my room for Edmonds, they promised me a non-smoking, accessible room.
They lied.
It took a couple of tries for the Priceline Customer Service folks to get the truth out of them: that all their accessible rooms were already booked, and they didn't have any non-smoking rooms available for more than a day or two of our four-day stay. Priceline canceled the reservation for me, refunded the charge, and I went back online to look for another place, with six days to go.
Found one, too. My choices were all either in Renton, in deep southeast Seattle, or Everett, about 20 miles north, so I chose Everett. (Never choose to drive south Seattle if you don't have to.) Paid a little extra, about 9 bucks a night, for a non-smoking room.
And still saved nearly a hundred dollars over Lying Suites by Liars.