My wife and I stayed here on the Saturday night of the Seattle to Portland bike ride, as Centralia is near the halfway point.

Check-in was fine, the staff seemed very pleasant. As all that I really wanted to do was to shower the accumulated dirt of 120 cycling miles from my body, I was looking forward to taking a shower. Upon turning the hot water valve in the bathroom sink, or the shower for that matter, all that I was treated to was a brown trickle. There was NO hot water at all!

I should talk about the room, as well. It was very obviously recently redone. The carpet and the linens were quite new, in fact the room smelled of new carpet.

My cold shower having invigorated my tired muscles and bones, we left the room to take a walk in the park that is just adjacent to the hotel. When we returned, we discovered that our key card did not work. I walked down to the front desk, and patiently waited five minutes for the clerk to finish checking in the party in front of me. As she finished up, she explained to me that I would have to wait another 5 minutes or so, since there was another check-in that showed up in front of me, but that couple was gracious enough to let me have the 10 seconds required to program another pair of cards.

I returned to the room--and nothing, still locked out. My wife walked down to the front desk, and returned with two additional new key cards; neither of these worked either. She returned to the front desk, and a site manager was sent to assist. He proceeded to clean the card reader and told us that everything seemed ok, and that it was ok that the light in the card lock only flashed every other time, or so. That said, we had no further issues with getting into our room the rest of our stay.

We tried the hot water again the next morning, and my wife decided to skip a shower rather than suffer under a cold stream at 6am.

The "cherry on top" of our Travelodge experience was as we were leaving the next morning, I dumped the balance of the complimentary coffee (nice touch, btw) out of the pot into the bathroom sink, and most of it ended up hitting the carpeted floor under the sink. We looked at each other, and laughed as we left the room.

In summary, the staff is fine, and friendly enough, but they are severely handicapped by a property that will need serious continued improvements in order to be anything more than a basic place to lay your head and take a freezing shower.