ConnectiKoL2, a photoset that should have been about another wonderful KoL meet, but which came to be mostly about the hotel staff, because they forced it to be.

The first picture of the trip, taken from the parking lot where I work, of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport in the distance, which I am not sure has ever had an international flight in or out of it.

Along Interstate 84 in New York, the guard rails, which at some point became known as guide rails for no readily apparent reason but probably due to litigation, are made utilizing state of the art technology from 1948.

Okay, sports fans, what's wrong with this picture?

Apparently Connecticut has bridge stacking contests. Not something I'd do with my time, but to each their own.

This is scenic downtown Hartford, which is probably best known as a city you frequently have to go through on your way to Boston. It's even the town's motto. "Hartford: Gateway To Boston!"

Connecticut has some fabulous sunsets. The fact that meets typically begin with the sun setting on us never struck me as a particularly bad omen until now.

One of my first thoughts upon arriving was the realization that there was no central meeting place for all of us to get together here. I hadn't expected one at an Econo Lodge, but I thought maybe there would be one anyway. It was slightly disappointing to find there wasn't, but still, I didn't worry about it. Figured it was no big deal, really. We've had plenty of meets before, and will have plenty more in the future. We can make it work, and there's absolutely no reason to expect the worst, right? Right?

Here's Dazz wearing a great shirt. I want me one of these.

This is what a KoL meet looks like from above, just in case any of you had ever wondered.

Is it a bad sign when there aren't even Bibles in the desk drawers?

Okay, Bibles are technically optional, but I am dead certain that the chairs shouldn't lean like this when you sit on them. Not pictured is the door to the bathroom, which was physically incapable of being shut, because the latch on the door did not line up with the opening in the door frame. One was higher than the other. The bathroom door in MrGreenSmiling's room closed just fine, as did the door to the room, though there was a huge crack in the door frame around the door latch. MrGreenSmiling joked about not having to worry about crooks because the room had already been broken into. At the time, this was still funny.

I didn't take a lot of pictures the next morning, when things started getting ugly. Econo Lodge's management was unhappy with the fact that we had far people in some of the rooms than we were supposed to. Apparently occupancy is two, and you have to pay extra for others. Okay, I'm with them so far, at least in principle. I mean, I can understand how an owner could be a little unhappy if ten people are staying in one room. So, they're unhappy with the situation, they know what rooms we're in, and they know Lehks is the person who arranged this and is therefore ostensibly in charge here. They also claim to have video proof of how many people stayed in which rooms, which I'm not so sure is true despite the video cameras around, but okay. Quick quiz: If you're the owner, how do you handle this situation? Do you go to the rooms that had too many people and explain that you're charging them an extra $12 per person? Do you let Lehks know and make him track the people down? Do you just be rude and drop the charges onto the bill without bothering to tell anyone?

If your answer was any of the above, you clearly have never attended Hermann Goering Charm School. What they did was lock out the room cards of everyone who was associated with the KoL meet, including the cards of those they refused to give the group discount to, then tracked down Lehks and tried to make him sign a form replete with grammatical errors that would have allowed them to charge his credit card for any and all damages that occurred at the hotel during the meet. Considering the damages that already existed at the hotel when we arrived and our inability to prove we didn't cause them, this could conceivably have bankrupted him. Our room had multiple cigarette burns on the bedspread, some on the blanket, and at least one in the bathroom floor linoleum. They could claim that we were responsible for all of that and charge Lehks for all of it, if they were of a mind to. Lehks, understandably, refused to sign.

We're not con men and we try to be fair, so a number of people went to the office and paid for the people who were in their rooms without too much complaint about that, even if they were unhappy about how management approached the situation. When Princess Sunshine and I realized what was going on, I suggested that we should go and get all of our stuff out of our room, just in case. She agreed, but when we got back up to our room we were locked out. We couldn't get in to get our stuff, which really pissed Princess Sunshine off because she had spent several minutes arguing with the clerk when she checked in because he refused to give her the group discount. As far as the hotel was concerned, she wasn't part of the KoL group. In addition, only two of us stayed in the room, so we weren't in violation on that front anyway. Princess Sunshine wasn't about to go through another round of arguing with them. She decided to take a different approach to the situation.

A historic convention first: KoL called the police on the hotel. Yes indeed, up is down, left is right, dogs and cats sleeping together... We ended up with a very polite and reasonable officer who listened to what we had to say and did what he could to resolve the situation. He told the manager on duty, "You normally have prostitutes and drug dealers in here, and you get some decent people, and you're giving them a hard time." He also asked us why exactly we chose this hotel of all places for our get-together, and even suggested some other places nearby that were of comparable cost and better quality. He stuck around for a while after we were able to get back into the room, and Princess Sunshine ended up chatting with him for about forty minutes about various things. I missed that because I refused to leave the room until we had all our stuff out of it, because I didn't trust them not to lock our key out again, which is in fact exactly what they did. I didn't have a card but Princess Sunshine did, and when we went down to the office the guy told us that he was refunding her money for the second day and told us to stay somewhere else Saturday night.

Just so we're clear on this point... This is an Econo Lodge whose normal clientele are drug dealers and hookers, and Princess Sunshine and I got kicked out. She made some noise about it, but the guy wouldn't budge. He even said that they were full up and the room had already been reserved for someone else, which I believed about as far as I could shotput a Chrysler. I decided not to make a big deal out of the towel that smelled filthy or the door that didn't shut or the cigarette burns or anything else of the like. We decided to leave the premises for a while, since it was almost time for Cola Wars anyway.

We didn't get the worst of the towels, though. Another person said she washed her face, and when she used the towel to dry her face she ended up getting grit in her eyes. Since I try to be even-handed, let me just add the one positive thing I have to say about this Econo Lodge: Our room's shower had great water pressure. Most hotels don't. That concludes my list of positive things about the hotel. Moving on...

Um, yeah... This happened.

"Someone hid some plastic easter eggs in the woods? Me first! Stampede! Stampede! Outta my way, jerkass!"

The park apparently had termite issues, but they didn't become an issue while we were there.

I rather liked the location.

I was, however, far too lazy to walk around the lake.

The stampede returns, much more subdued and rational than it was when it disappeared into the woods in the first place.

"Okay, everyone together for Cola Wars. Let's go over the game real quick. The objective is to steal the other team's cola. The cola is life. He who controls the cola controls the universe. Now, the rules. Rule number one: You do not talk about Cola Wars. Rule number two: You do not talk about Cola Wars. I think that about wraps it up. There will be no questions."

Ready...

Aim...

Slap fight!

"Great job, people. See you next year."

The Man Of The Hour.

I took a picture of KrakMunky pretending to take a picture of me.

Cool hair splay. Nuff said.

I was specifically instructed to take a picture of this, I swear.

This is a picture of nothing in particular, taken on the way back from the airport to pick up Princess Sunshine's lost luggage, which is another complication in this weekend which I should have mentioned earlier except I forgot. I got from the park to the airport with no trouble, then got hopelessly lost about a mile or so from the hotel. Oh yeah, we went back to the hotel. Everyone we came to see was there and we weren't about to pass that up just because management was giving us grief.

Lehks, who deserves better for working on putting this meet together than the grief he got.

Okay, this is bad. I've been trying to stay optimistic, trying to look the bright side, but this is making it difficult. As long as it doesn't get any worse... For the record, this is Merric, not be confused with Merik, or Merruk, or Mirreck, or Murak, or Merle, or Raymond Luxury Yacht (it's spelled Raymond Luxury Yacht, but it's pronounced Merrik). In a way, I kinda hope the geniuses running this place were watching on the cameras, just so I can imagine them trying to figure out what the hell is going on here.

A red heart-shaped hot tub is much cooler in concept than in reality.

Robble robble!

Okay, optimism hell. Worst! Meet! EVER!

Wait, let's reserve judgement here for a moment... Yes, there was an effort to make a duct tape bra. It was successful, though I didn't take a picture of it being modeled. Perhaps others did.

Chez Gay was hot and loud and there was some awful music playing (Aqua? Please! To each their own, but can't you do better than THAT?) but as Princess Sunshine was trying to keep a low profile and we didn't have a room of our own, there was really nowhere else for us to go. Eventually I started taking random pictures just to have something to do, and hopefully to get a few more photos that I could say something witty about. Didn't really work, though. This is one of the few that came out. Either she's somewhat upside down in this picture or I was upside down when I took it, but it was at about this time that Merric, dressed as he appears two pictures above this one, stepped over me and Princess Sunshine while we sprawled out on the floor. (No, I didn't take a picture of that either.)

The largest fucking scarf in the entire world attacks and nearly kills another victim.

Karl Dark on Sunday morning, which for some reason is traditionally considered god's day, with his giant inflatable autographed penis. I am sure that if god actually existed, she would approve of this.

A love message for Econo Lodge.

The traditional festive post-meet group loiter.

Remember when I said MrGreenSmiling's door frame was cracked? By Sunday morning, the crack-weakened frame reached the point where the latch fell out completely. A KoLer checked it out and suggested that part of the problem could be that the door frame is made of pine. MrGreenSmiling was running a bit late for the 11 AM checkout and called the front desk asking for an extra hour before checkout, which was granted. A few minutes later, a guy came around making sure everyone was out, and told them they had to leave. MrGreenSmiling pointed out that he had received permission from the front desk to check out at noon and was told "I don't know anything about that. You have to leave."

It got worse. The guy noticed the doorframe and got real worked up. He actually said, "We cannot make money off the room with it like this." He tried to get into the room by pushing past MrGreenSmiling, who had to plant a hand on the guy's chest and push him back out onto the sidewalk. They went back and forth a bit, MrGreenSmiling getting a bit more worked up than I'm used to seeing him get. He used to run his own business and has a good idea of how to treat customers, and he hadn't seen so much as a hint of it all weekend, and I think having the guy try to push him around, literally, was the last straw. He shouted, "This place is a shithole. Go to hell," which is what we were all thinking, only he phrased it much more politely than we were thinking it. The guy realized he wasn't going to be able to bully MrGreenSmiling, so that left Plan B, which was delayed only until he could find a coworker so he could have the advantage of numbers. Then, Plan B came to fruition:

Chuckles The Clown and his faithful sidekick Buster The Wonder Horse tracked down Lehks and told him they were going to bill him for the damages. Never mind that the room was damaged previously, never mind that the room wasn't even in his name, they tried to stick him with this. They also told him that KoL was not welcome back at the hotel. Way ahead of ya there, pals.

We were going to leave this message for the hotel staff, but decided instead to maintain some moral high ground. On the way out, MrGreenSmiling stopped in the office to discuss the damage to the door. I understand it didn't go well: The staff was as abusive as ever, he was telling the staff that they were trash and not worth arguing with, and eventually Drunken Irishman threatened to rip the ice machine off the wall and fling it across the office, at which point MrGreenSmiling grabbed his arm and escorted him out to the car and drove away. I have to admit, I was sorry Dazz left on Saturday, because if he had seen everything that was going on and they tried to pull this sort of shit on him, I would've loved to witness his contribution to negotiations with management.

It's worth noting here, because I won't get another chance, that we were in room 174, which somehow ended up in the hands of someone else from KoL once we got kicked out. There was a woman of questionable reputation who walked into the office and asked for that room by number, calling it "the usual." She was offered a room next to it and declined. Apparently we spent the night in a room that... Well, you can put two and two together.

The happy couple. Remember, if you've read the East Hartford Econo Lodge Public Relations Handbook, you will certainly understand why whores and drug dealers are the ideal clients when compared to these two monsters. If, however, you have a brain in your head or the slightest shred of common sense, this will continue to baffle you.

They took a picture of us; we took a picture of them. Tit for tat, whatever the hell that means.

Antipode and his two best friends.

Princess Sunshine is an honorary gay guy.

Wireless table tennis, as opposed to the traditional wired kind.

Batteries and glue: Together at last! Seriously, who would package AAA batteries with Crayola glitter glue? "Hey, you got glue in my batteries!" "Hey, you got batteries in my glue!"

Antipode would make a good Price Is Right girl, though he admitted to being worried about the potential obligation to sleep with Bob Barker.

And it just gets better. Target has some fabulous crap.

Look at this gimmick! "Non-corrosive exterior." The interior, of course, will be shot to hell by the third week.

One of these loaves costs $2.29. The other four cost $229.00.

Here's the bridge stack as seen coming from the other direction as a major thunderstorm approaches. I didn't really get any photos of the thunderstorm itself because at the height of the storm I was going 30 miles an hour in the passing lane with the wipers on max, and between swipes of the wiper blades the water accumulated so fast that I could actually see it flowing down the windshield, and I would completely lose sight of the tail lights of the truck in front of me. Bad time to be taking pictures, when you're worried that even if you manage not to rear-end the guy in front of you, that the guy behind you might not be so lucky.

And finally, back into Pennsylvania, where I'll be honest, I rarely got down as slow as 65 for the rest of I-84. The weekend began with a sunset and ended with a severe storm, and everything about the hotel sucked, but other than that it was great. Seriously, the afternoon at the park was great, the meals out were good... The only time there was a problem was when the hotel staff got involved. The only way they could have been more evil is if they had come around and kicked us all out at 2 AM. After dealing with that shit for two days, I just wanted to get home. Other than the hotel crap, I had a great time, which is kind of like saying the Titanic's first voyage was ideal except for the iceberg, but there it is. Until next time...