Family Medicine: So we went to Louisville the other day...

We went to Louisville a couple of weeks ago in order to get a great deal on a carseat from a lady there. (She'd found it accidentally marked at $30 instead of the $190 it usually is and bought it, so we got it from her. What a wonderful, wonderful thing!)

We decided we'd only spend the night there if we could find a hotel for $50 or under. Otherwise we'd do the trip in one day (it's a 4 hour drive to Louisville). Hooray! We found the hotel! So excited were we for our little vacation that we didn't think to read the hotel reviews first.

We arrived at our hotel, a more-than-vaguely sketchy little thing in Indiana, just across the river from Louisville. The front desk first gave us the key to the wrong room. We walked into our room and find the bed unmade, suitcases out, clothes on the floor...and as we were walking back down to the front desk to fix this mistake, we passed an old couple walking to the room. Unfortunately, authorizing our key to their room inactivated their keys. Fortunately, the front desk lady met us all on the stairs and straightened things out. Then we arrived at our real room. I wish we'd taken pictures! Here's what our room consisted of:

The bedding, towels, and furniture were all stained, torn, dirty, or shredded. Every last one. I don't know what blue thing happened on those towels, and I don't want to know.
About half of the lights worked. Some of them had no chance, like the one mounted to the wall by the bed with its cord dangling down into nothing - there was no outlet for it.
The sink made a loud whining sound that may or may not have made me shriek when I washed my hands.
The bathroom....ah, the bathroom. There was someone else's pubic hair in our toilet. The walls had smudges and dirt on them. The tub itself and the inside of the shower curtain looked like Jackson Pollock had decorated them with mildew and mold. It was textured with them. We opted to not shower

After seeing this, we pulled up reviews for the place. Apparently this is normal and reviews all said that asking for a new room often cost extra and usually ended up with a worse room. Apparently it's a common short-to-long term "home" for vagrants, since it's cheap. Apparently some of these vagrants are known for selling drugs and sex here. Apparently drug busts have happened while visitors stayed here. And apparently sometimes you can find drug paraphernalia in your rooms. (We looked but didn't find any.) At least there were no bed bugs or cockroaches (that we saw) and since it was late, we just slept carefully and brushed our teeth at a McDonald's the next day. Upon checkout, we found another couple with the same sort of room situation as ours. Our car wasn't even stolen!

We really enjoyed downtown Louisville. I'd forgotten about public art! And museums! And being near stuff! This is on the same street as the Slugger Museum, and we wandered the area for a couple of hours.

We found a neat science exploration center. We spent an hour in it and didn't even see a full third of their fun activities and learning stations. It was free! It's like Salt Lake's planetarium, but better. We found it because it had this sweet satellite dish mirror outside.