Hotel Henry Berrisford

3/28/2008

Hotel Henry Berrisford, while grand in name is nothing but a dump in actuality. I should have known from the description in my guide book “Beware, it often runs out of water and/or electricity,” that it was not the best place, but it was the only place still taking reservations, and the book also claimed that it had clean rooms (albeit this book was published in 2004).

On top of being burdened with noisy neighbors and paper thin walls (although this did not bother me as much as Laura and Marissa because I’m still lucky enough to be able to sleep through everything) we had the added addition of roaches. If nothing else, this reminded me why I am so lucky to be living in the cold highlands, because the largest bug I have seen here was a spider and couldn’t have been larger than my thumbnail.

Insects are not one of the things I tolerate well, especially roaches. I think this dates back to when we lived in New Orleans and roaches infested pretty much everything. Upon discovery of our roach, Laura and I reacted naturally, screaming and jumping up onto our beds, as it scurried out of the bathroom and into a corner. I promptly exclaimed I would never be able to sleep with roach in the room and Marissa looked at both of us like we were fools.

Luckily Marissa being the sweet, caring, loveable girl that she is, decided to rectify the situation by initiating a roach execution. This of course depended upon us being able to locate the pest, so Laura and I shoved beds around the room screaming while Marissa chased it with a shoe. I’m quite sure passersby might have thought we were the ones having our lives threatened from all the noise we were making.

An eternity later, the speedy devil met his demise in the bathroom with a resounding smack from Marissa’s shoe, and I was able to sleep peacefully through the night without worrying that some large insect would crawl across me in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, Marissa was not as fortunate. Arriving home from the bars at 3 am, our neighbors decided to have a scream fest of their own.