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I am a college student, if you use the box below I earn money to spend on Amazon to buy books. 6/16/2008
The Classy Evergreen
I may have talked about my summer job where I travelled the country counting seed packets at the end of planting season. I actually worked for the company for two seasons and while I didn't make a ton of money I did enjoy seeing the country at a young age.
I didn't make a ton of money because these people were cheap. While the company is fairly well known we were given insanely low maximums for hotel room and if you had to go over (which I did...I was without a travel partner for much of the time) it was deducted from your pay check. At one point I was in the same city as the Football Hall of Fame during induction week. I think I was at a Super 8 that cost close to $80, and that was about eleven years ago. We were assigned travel partners, but by mid-summer my first year of working for them I requested the San Francisco area and my travel partner opted to go straight home (presumably to do more "bump," a drug she'd raved about in the short time I knew her). This left twenty-year-old me alone, and without a travel partner my expenses increased but my hotel allowance stayed the same. I will save the rest of this story for later if you want to hear it. It's fun, and I look back on those two summers with much fondness. Don't tell them (they'll come back wanting me to reimburse them) but I would've done it for almost free since they covered gas, hotels, meals, and some incidentals. While I did have a cell phone (incredibly rare at the time, and it was parental issue, not company) I opted instead to stop at the various and sundry coin-op phones that you used to see. I ate at truck stops! I spent time in highwayside motels with vibrating beds and sweeping views of the coast and the mountains!
But I'm not going to talk about that today. Instead I'll talk about a small place outside of New Orleans called the Evergreen Plaza Inn in Metairie, LA.
My second summer I was paired with a good friend and we were sent South to Louisiana, the state I'd spent some time in my first year. I was newly 21 and ready to prove it in the French Quarter. After a weekend of such, L and I ended up in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. I'm not sure why we chose the Evergreen--I think it's probably because of the hotel coupon magazines you see at rest stops (those things were a lifesaver--we stayed smack in the middle of the Quarter for $29 a night).
The front desk clerk was an albino version of Richard Simmons who wore thick glasses and clear polish on his fingers. Our room was by the pool and we could see no problems with this. Upon check in we noticed that one of the channels seemed to always show free pornography; we couldn't believe this and left it on all the time because we COULD. There was nothing titillating about this, it was simply an oddity that we embraced. The source of this pornography was a VCR in the business office; I found this out when I went to pay for another several days and saw Albino Richard switching the cassettes. At the end of our stay we were completely desensitized to sex.
We later found out that this hotel was a preferred spot for thug teens to throw parties. We were awakened in the wee hours by the sounds of hardcore porn (this time NOT from our own television) and the terrible noises created by Master P 9I am loathe to call it "rap," let alone "music"). Apparently there was a pool party also. We called the hotel office and the music only got louder. The hotel office really treated us in a way that led us to believe that the Partiers' comfort superceded ours. Luckily our stay in that area was done and we moved on.
There was also a weird supernatural event that I won't go into here, but I would not be surprised to find out that the seediness of this place thinned the veil between our world and the Netherworld.
More information can be found:
The hotel's official site
TripAdvisor review from 2003. Little seems to have changed.
A very bare Yahoo travel page, worth linking only for the sole review (close to the bottom).
The Google Maps view. Take a look at satellite view, zoom in to see the pure class.
I didn't make a ton of money because these people were cheap. While the company is fairly well known we were given insanely low maximums for hotel room and if you had to go over (which I did...I was without a travel partner for much of the time) it was deducted from your pay check. At one point I was in the same city as the Football Hall of Fame during induction week. I think I was at a Super 8 that cost close to $80, and that was about eleven years ago. We were assigned travel partners, but by mid-summer my first year of working for them I requested the San Francisco area and my travel partner opted to go straight home (presumably to do more "bump," a drug she'd raved about in the short time I knew her). This left twenty-year-old me alone, and without a travel partner my expenses increased but my hotel allowance stayed the same. I will save the rest of this story for later if you want to hear it. It's fun, and I look back on those two summers with much fondness. Don't tell them (they'll come back wanting me to reimburse them) but I would've done it for almost free since they covered gas, hotels, meals, and some incidentals. While I did have a cell phone (incredibly rare at the time, and it was parental issue, not company) I opted instead to stop at the various and sundry coin-op phones that you used to see. I ate at truck stops! I spent time in highwayside motels with vibrating beds and sweeping views of the coast and the mountains!
But I'm not going to talk about that today. Instead I'll talk about a small place outside of New Orleans called the Evergreen Plaza Inn in Metairie, LA.
My second summer I was paired with a good friend and we were sent South to Louisiana, the state I'd spent some time in my first year. I was newly 21 and ready to prove it in the French Quarter. After a weekend of such, L and I ended up in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. I'm not sure why we chose the Evergreen--I think it's probably because of the hotel coupon magazines you see at rest stops (those things were a lifesaver--we stayed smack in the middle of the Quarter for $29 a night).
The front desk clerk was an albino version of Richard Simmons who wore thick glasses and clear polish on his fingers. Our room was by the pool and we could see no problems with this. Upon check in we noticed that one of the channels seemed to always show free pornography; we couldn't believe this and left it on all the time because we COULD. There was nothing titillating about this, it was simply an oddity that we embraced. The source of this pornography was a VCR in the business office; I found this out when I went to pay for another several days and saw Albino Richard switching the cassettes. At the end of our stay we were completely desensitized to sex.
We later found out that this hotel was a preferred spot for thug teens to throw parties. We were awakened in the wee hours by the sounds of hardcore porn (this time NOT from our own television) and the terrible noises created by Master P 9I am loathe to call it "rap," let alone "music"). Apparently there was a pool party also. We called the hotel office and the music only got louder. The hotel office really treated us in a way that led us to believe that the Partiers' comfort superceded ours. Luckily our stay in that area was done and we moved on.
There was also a weird supernatural event that I won't go into here, but I would not be surprised to find out that the seediness of this place thinned the veil between our world and the Netherworld.
More information can be found:
The hotel's official site
TripAdvisor review from 2003. Little seems to have changed.
A very bare Yahoo travel page, worth linking only for the sole review (close to the bottom).
The Google Maps view. Take a look at satellite view, zoom in to see the pure class.
posted by Leah at 6/16/2008 05:52:00 PM
2 Comments:
Believe it or not, I stopped there in April of this year when I was in New Orleans during Jazz Fest and Ponderosa Stomp. They were one of the only places for miles that had rooms and unfortunately the albino Richard Simmons wasn't on duty or I may have stayed. I went elsewhere after determining that most of the other guests were long-term residents and thinking my car might not be there when I woke up in the morning. The "down home cooking" smell of the place was something else too. It was like a combination of Mexico and India.
I read your recent blog entries after some time away. Really cool to catch up. Are you derbying?
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