Yesterday was the Fourth of July, or American Independence Day. It's one of the biggest holidays in the US, though most people seem to have forgotten what we're celebrating. This isn't going to be a rant about patriotic drivel, though. Y'all know me better than that.
Being a holiday weekend, the hotel was slam-full. That's good for business, but woeful wear-and-tear on the staff. We were host to two family reunions and a wedding party. Plus the GM's in-laws to-be were celebrating their patriarch's 85th birthday. Then there were all of the usual holiday vacationers.
I hate family reunions, at least with regard to how the attendees behave in a hotel environment. The larger of the two reunions accounted for half of our occupancy for this weekend, so the management/sales team made nice with them and gave them carte blanche to do all sorts of activities. Friday night, this included them hooking a karaoke machine to the lobby TV and caterwauling till 0130. If I ever have to listen to another teenage girl with a weak voice hack her way through an old Whitney Houston standard, I may kill myself. The same goes for Mariah Carey. The best performance all night was a little girl, maybe five years-old, who sang "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". It was pitch-perfect. I'm not kidding.
Saturday night, they were not as raucous, but the last of them didn't leave the lobby until almost 0500, when the breakfast crew came in.
This weekend there were fireworks for Norfolk's Harborfest on Friday and Saturday night. They have another round planned for tonight. Last night, the turnout in Portsmouth was huge, and all of the outbound traffic after the show poured out from Downtown through my neighborhood. I left for work an additional twenty minutes early, and was still twenty minutes late, due to the additional traffic through my neighborhood. It took me almost an hour just to get from my apartment to the on-ramp for the Western Freeway, normally a trip of five to ten minutes.
So, yeah. I hate holidays.
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