This past week (Monday-Friday) I was in New Orleans for a business trip. I’m going to break the recap of the trip into several parts, to keep it from getting overly long. Probably I’ll write about the hotel, then the street people, then what I did for work when I went down there, then the food and drink.
I stayed at the Sheraton at 500 Canal Street. I arrived at the hotel to find teenagers with green backpacks everywhere. I mean, EVERYWHERE. They were sitting all over the lobby, lying on the floor, waiting in lines 15 deep for the elevator, etc. I found out later they were Lutheran kids attending a national youth conference. They were nice enough kids but damn they were loud and in the way. A few minutes after I got to my room, one of them tried to walk right in and said, “Hi neighbor” – thank goodness I had the latch on. The walls of the Sheraton were paper thin and they were running from room to room and yelling until after 1 AM. Not real good when I had to be at a board meeting at 9 in the morning.
Then there were the elevators. At the Sheraton, there were five elevators. You punch your floor number into a keypad and it tells you which elevator to get on. In theory, this gets everyone to their rooms as efficiently as possible. In practice, it told everyone to get on the same elevator, and I found myself crammed in with about 15 kids, with the elevator stopping on damn near every floor before it reached my floor, 20. Tuesday morning I attempted to go on my Mountain Dew run to the CVS down the street. (There was a soft drink machine on my floor but the kids had cleaned it out.) I punched 1 into the elevator keypad. “Car B,” it told me. And I waited. And waited. And waited. After 5 minutes, Car B (nor any of the other elevator cars) had shown up, and I was getting so short on time that I simply gave up.
I also thought it was strange that a hotel at this price point would charge by the day for Internet access. Of course, I’ll hand in a receipt to work and get it back, but if I were on a vacation I’d be irritated at having to pay it. Hotels much less expensive than the Sheraton offer free Internet in the rooms. They had it for free in the lobby, but I wanted to be in the comfort of my own room.
That’s not to say it was all bad – the room was very nice, and once the kids left on Wednesday, the elevators started working better. Also, the location is ideal – all you have to do is cross Canal Street and you’re in the French Quarter, with Bourbon Street two and a half blocks away. I just got a sense that when the hotel is loaded to capacity for a convention, they have a little trouble keeping up. If you come to New Orleans, the Sheraton wouldn’t be a bad place to stay – just check and make sure there is not a major convention in town when you’re there.
Part 2 – French Quarter street people – coming soon.