Brown out

So. The Brown Hotel, in lovely downtown Louisville, KY:

Lovely place. Comfortable bed. Nice chair. I won't say the room struck me as spectacular; in fact, less expensive places I've stayed in have seemed better equipped, with microwaves and little fridges and stuff. But I guess when you pay more you get less practicality, more ambiance.

The staff seemed very intent on letting us know as pleasantly as possible that we were working class riff raff who didn't belong there, and while the law might require them to admit us, we should never ever forget that this was not our proper place. The very polished looking fellow stationed at the door outside the elegant lobby bar snickered when he saw the large YMCA logo on the black canvas suitcase I was lugging, and the sleek, expensive looking redhead behind the desk was happy to announce in a loud, carrying voice that I was using a debit card, rather than a credit card, when we checked in. She did, however, give me a break when it turned out that the discount room rate I had found searching around on the web was an American Automotive Association rate, and I am not a member; she sort of sneered and said "Well, I guess we can let it go just this once." Which was very human of her. I'm sure it strained something deep inside her, but I appreciated it.

(I just went to some discount room search sites. I had never done it before; I had no idea it was an AAA only discount.)

Then I woke up the next morning after we watched PROMETHEUS for twelve bucks on their in house cable, and discovered our invoice had been pushed under the door during the night, and apparently, my wife and I had gone down to that oh so elegant bar and drunk $66 worth of liquor. Which was a fabulous trick, since we hadn't left the room at all after arriving in it. (My first reaction was that I would have a difficult time imagining $66 worth of liquor, much less drinking it, but then I reflected that this was the Brown Hotel, and it would probably not take Han Solo's imagination to encompass $66 worth of elegant Brown Hotel lobby bar liquor. In fact, probably that android from PROMETHEUS could imagine it fairly easily.)

The room was a little noisier than I would have liked for the discount enormous price that I paid, and I'd honestly expected that a place like the Brown would have nicer accoutrements -- towels, glasses, and such -- than the typical hotel fare that was actually there. But we did get breakfast in our room, and the bacon was amazing, which it should have been, for what it cost.

The guy at the front desk when we went down was much more pleasant than the chick from the night before, perhaps because we were leaving. But he did take the erroneous bar check off our tab without protest.

All told, it was a lovely experience, but the folks who run the Brown, and their preferred patrons, need to study their history. Specifically, the French Revolution.