BE WARNED: This motel's convenient location and low price makes it not only convenient to you but also to anyone looking for a private location to carry out any number of illegal drug negotiations or take part in other profoundly--shall we say--unbiblical activities. With luck, they will be in the room next to you. Last week, on a night where only three rooms were occupied in the whole motel (by three separate parties), our nightmare began when the clerk ensured that the rooms were adjacent to each other (which always irritates me). I decided not to complain about this however because the language barrier between myself and the clerk had nearly made it impossible to make the original trasaction, and I was too tired to go back in to make this finer point. The room was small as expected but made extra dark because the wall mounted lights were broken off and dangling from their sockets. By removing the lampshades from the two inoperable lamps and placing them on top of the shade of the one working lamp, it was possible to mute the light enough not to burn your eyes from the 150 watt bulb brought in presumably to compensate for the lack of light elsewhere in the room. The occupants of the room next door made their presence felt immediately with a welcoming F-bomb-rich barrage of violent obscenities accompanied by the sound of what I took to be a human skull being slammed against one of the walls. So we stepped out and walked over to the conveniently close casinos, as we had intended to do, hoping that our neighbors by the time we got back would either have settled their differences, passed out in a drug and alcohol-induced group coma, or been hauled away in a combination of police cars and body bags. No such luck. Several hours having passed and now being after midnight, they were still going at it. As long as our heater had been blasting on “high” and our TV was blaring it was possible for moments at a time to imagine we weren’t in a fleabag crap-hole motel in the slimy butt-crack of Atlantic City, but when the TV was turned off and the heat was lowered for sleeping, it became impossible to forget. A woman had arrived and the noise from the room next door had escalated into a series of plaster-cracking thuds on the shared wall accompanied by a colorful verbal exchange involving the words ""Payback"" ""B*tch” and, most notably, ""Kill"". At around 3:30AM (when the arrival bullets through the wall seemed a real possibility), I returned to the office and complained to the 16 year old desk clerk who had no idea what to do. He called the room in question and the occupants stopped beating one another's heads against the wall long enough to answer the phone and say everything was “cool”. I suggested that he call 911 but judging by the sound of the constant sirens screaming past at high speed all night, the nightly call from the Rodeway would be a low priority. Angry, I checked us out before 4AM having only spent less than three hours in our room. No refund, no meaningful apology. We took refuge in the Denny's in Absecon—the town we should have stayed at in the first place—and waited out the sunrise. $45—one dollar per minute of sleep in this awful dump is not a good value now matter how cheap or tempting it may seem. Take your chances if you like but please promise me that you will NEVER take children to this place.
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