Many years ago, I was traveling through the woodlands of Northern Louisiana, which was the style at the time. I spent the night at a sleep spot off Interstate 20, a Red Roof Inn, I think it was. Everything was fine until the next morning, when I tried to take a shower, and found out that the water was cold. I wrote an Epinion about it, said that the place was a dump, and that was pretty much that. Only some witless troll left a comment about it, saying that I wasn't trulyproviding consumerly helpful details because I didn't say whether the hotel provided a continental breakfast. This led to all sorts of snarkiness and fun, and to this day I only do hotel reviews on Eps just to tick these sort of people off. (You know who you are.)

Okay, so the Sheraton hotel in East Hartford, Connecticut was basically a sleep spot on this trip. We checked in a little before midnight, after the Baylor-UConn game, and left the next morning. I could not tell you a thing about the amenities at this particular hotel, because I was not inside it with my eyes open for more than twenty minutes. The check-in person was very nice. I got my Starwood points. The bed was acceptable, if perhaps not quite up to Sheraton Sweet Sleeper standards, but it was okay. I do not know a thing about room service or Internet hookup or meeting rooms, and they didn't have a free breakfast. If there was decor in the room, I didn't see it and couldn't have cared less.

I would normally not even bother doing an Epinion at all, if it weren't for the hot water.

You see, if you like plumbing - even a little bit - you have to check out the Sheraton in East Hartford. It starts with the toilet. You don't really hear a lot about toilets in hotel rooms, for the simple reason that if it works, people don't want to talk about it, and if it doesn't work, it's embarrassing. Let me tell you something. This toilet worked. This toilet is a leftover, a dinosaur, a remnant of the glory days of American plumbing, long before the Nanny State dictated low-flow toilets. I would be proud to have this toilet in my home. I wish I could.

And then there's the shower. Most hotel rooms have crummy showers with controls that don't make sense. This was one of the best shower experiences I have ever had - fully adjustable, decadent almost, and with cascades of as much hot water as you could ever want. If I didn't have to check out, and if you could really cook in the shower the way they did in that one Seinfeld episode, I would be there still. I'm not even being sarcastic. It was a great shower, and I can't think of a better reason to stay there again (if I was ever tempted to make a business trip to East Hartford, Connecticut, which I hope God will spare me from ever having to do in my life).

You're going to do at minumum two things in your hotel room (if you do more than that, I don't want to know about it). You're going to sleep. And you're going to shower (or at least I hope so). I can't speak to the maximalist hotel-goer in terms of the quality of this hotel, but minimalists like me who don't ask for much in terms of hotel quality for sleep spots will seek out places with better-than-average beds and great hot water. That's the Sheraton East Hartford, and I would be proud to stay there another time.