No Free Lunch

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. I think this is even more true of breakfast, which many hotels are offering these days, to sweeten the pot (or make you think more kindly of the high room rate you just paid). But not all free breakfast is the same…

Take the hotel in Trinidad, NM. Dodgy. We got to sit in the restaurant next door, and had a choice of two kids meals, both of which were undercooked and unsatisfying, and did not include coffee. Then we had to wait at the register for what seemed a lifetime, before one of the four employees would stop and take our money (we had to pay for coffee). Dave finally grabbed one of them, and said they either waited on us now, or they wouldn't get paid.

In contrast, most of the other hotels we stayed in had a buffet or cook-your-own setup, with food ranging from yogurt, fresh fruit, cold cereal, bagels and toast with jam and PB, waffles, coffee and tea, and two kinds of juice. A couple of them had scrambled eggs and sausage patties, and another even had biscuits and gravy along with the eggs and sausage.