Pros; Cheap.


Cons; Let’s start from the beginning. As we were driving in the neighborhood, we knew that things were going to be flat out bad. The place is located in a really shady place of LA. Regardless, we were still hoping that somehow, the hotel would be after this area. It wasn’t. This was around 10PM.

So we pull in the parking lot. As we were pulling in, we saw a couple of cars with 30-something inch chrome rims. This definitely didn’t raise our hopes one bit. So we go in , park, and look around for the front desk to check in. There was nothing around … until we saw the sign for “Office” – a hole in the wall. The light was off, so we naturally assumed that for some unknown reason, the hotel was closed. But we still get close to the “Office”. There was someone there, behind bulletproof glass. The whole time that we were checking in, the light remained off. I will let you to draw your own conclusions, but as far as we are concerned, these people were most likely robbed, shot at, and who knows what else, so they were taking precaution. Good for them, I guess.

The room. Oh my, where do we start … as soon as we go in, the stench of smoke was apparent. There definitely was a feeling that this place wasn’t what one would call clean. The walls were with covered with this 70s theme wooden sheets. The ceiling with mirrors. The pictures made it look funky and groovy, but oh boy, does it look ugly, wrong, gross (among others) when there in person. And yes, there was an ashtray on the table in the room. This was in a non-smoking room.

Fine, what about the sheets/comforters? Well, on the outside, the comforter looked old. I’d venture a guess it was definitely older than 10 years. We flip the comforter, and we’re greeted with circles of … we didn’t want to know. The stench of smoke was overwhelming that we went to get another room.

We get another room that didn’t have the smoke stench (though there was an ashtray on the table). The comforter had spots of 15-17 inch yellow circles all over the place. We put that down, and used a blanket that we had with us. And yes, we slept with our clothes on.
Around 4:45AM in the morning, the TV in the next room was turned on and the volume blasted to high heavens. This was a sign that we needed to get out of there. We checked out at 5AM (yes, the light in front “Office” was still off). We drove off very happy in knowing the following things; 1) we were alive, 2) our rental car wasn’t busted and 3) that we were alive (did we mention we are happy that we made it out of there, alive and in one piece?). After we got out of there, and made it away a safe distance, we concluded that it would have been better to have slept in the car instead – safer, cheaper, and probably gotten much better rest.