Hotel Adolphus

Since we already had a babysitter for overnight after the Bon Jovi concert, a couple of weeks before the show I decided to look into getting a hotel room downtown Dallas for the night and we could have a little overnight getaway. Then we wouldn't have to drive all the way home so late, and we could stay somewhere fancy for the night. Everything in downtown Dallas is expensive, let me just start right there. I was looking at minimum $150 for somewhere not very exciting and over $200 for the fancier places. So for kicks, I went to Priceline.com because I've never used it before and was able to get a room at the Hotel Adolphus for $88. When I went to their website, the rooms started at $229. Heck yeah, Priceline.com! Definitely will be using that again.

Some fun facts, the Hotel Adolphus was opened in October of 1912 and until 1923 was the tallest building in Texas standing at 22 floors (312 feet).  It was built by the founder of the Anheuser-Busch company, Adolphus Busch.

We had to valet our car for an additional $28 per day fee because there's no such thing as "self parking" at that place. But who knows how close the nearest public parking garage was, and since we didn't get finished with the concert until well after 11 pm I did not want to go traipsing through downtown close to midnight.  After all, I had left my little pink keychain mace at home. So we valeted the car. Ouch.

We were in room 808, which is a nice corner room so we had windows on two walls. I was very excited to have a pretty view. We could see the Bank of America Plaza (the neon green lit building at night) and watched people stand in line until the wee hours of the morning to get inside some nightclub. Crazy!

The hotel itself is very strangely laid out inside. I went exploring a little bit and walking through the halls sort of felt like I was wondering around inside the Titanic or something. There were hardly any windows since the hallways were in the middle of the building and they weren't straight at all. It would be easy to get lost in there I think.

Our room had an "honor bar", and I snapped a photo of the goodies that we had available for our cravings.  I totaled up our tab if we ate everything in this basket, including the 1 liter bottle of water: $42.75. Ha! That tin of Altoids? $4! The bottle of water was $7.

The shower had three temperature settings: "911 what's your emergency?", scalding, and normal heat. But the trick was normal heat was where the cold water should have been, so when you turn on the shower you normally turn it towards heat because you don't want to take a cold shower. Standard behavior, right? Only at this hotel, turning the shower to what you think is going to be normal hot will actually melt your flesh off. Consider yourself warned. Oh, and the hair dryer is not fancy enough to be stored in the bathroom - it's hiding in the closet in a little black velvet bag. I nearly panicked when I couldn't find it.

So while definitely not our normal stomping grounds, it was fun to pretend we were posh and fancy for one night. I will say that our bed was super comfortable, and considering that I was getting over bronchitis and Nick was battling a sinus infection, we both laid down and conked out.