July 29th, 2005 at 9:48 pm
These last two weeks have been spent at the Holiday Inn in Grand Junction, CO.
The bed was new and firm, almost too firm for my taste; a bit of a change compared to most hotels recently. The pillows were thick, probably foam. The room was quite clean. The sink and mirror are outside the bathroom. The smaller bathroom sported a heat lamp but no fan. The shower performed very well, the temperature never changing unless I wanted it to.
High speed Internet access operates a little strangely. Instead of resetting the connection in the morning when I wasn’t likely to use it, they wanted until about 10 or 11pm, resetting the connection when I was usually online. On two days the access stopped completely, forcing me to go to dialup.
The fitness center contained a nice TV, three treadmills, a small Nautilus, two bikes, and an elliptical. The elliptical was a strange beast. It insisted on using the pulse sensors on the hand grips to gauge whether or not one is about to die on the elliptical. The problem was that the sensors overestimated my pulse and slammed the brakes. There was no override. The display on the bikes were not lit, leaving me to work on the treadmill. They worked well, but there was no place to stick the PDA playing MP3s of Issues, Etc. (there, I promoted them).
The Holidome had two ping-pong tables, an indoor pool, and a video game room. The games left something to be desired. The only one I recognized was Karate Champ, and the others were pretty old. I wanted to play the pinball machine, but the plunger was missing, rendering the game useless.
There was no free breakfast, even for Priority Club members. This Holiday Inn has a proper restaurant and bakery. I ordered Southwest salads three times and an Asian salad once. The Asian salad was nasty, but the Southwest salads were good. This morning I took muffins in to the Service Coordinators. They were quite good, with fresh fruit, but an apple spice muffin still had some dough in the center.
Hotel access was combined with a gas station and situation next to an on-ramp to westbound I-70. It was hard to make a left turn into the hotel when the traffic was high.
The staff in both the restaurant and the hotel were friendly and courteous. They replaced my hotel key when it stopped working and promised to have maintenance look at the lock to make sure things were OK.
Not a bad Holiday Inn; I should have requested a refrigerator and a microwave. 
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