Hotel search

I'm faced with a long drive back from Wednesday's Mexico-Venezuela game. It will probably take me more than 90 minutes to get home from Qualcomm Stadium, so in a last-ditch effort to avoid a sleepy drive and to ensure that I would wake up Thursday morning in a bed and not a morgue, I considered looking into a couple of hotels.

First, I checked out the Marriott in La Jolla. What a perfect place. It's kinda near the stadium and - Hey! The Mexican national team is staying there. What a perfect place it would be to hang out with Kikin Fonseca and have a beer with him while we ponder just what the hell happened to his career. So I looked at the hotel and tried to find out the rates. Simple enough: check in on Feb. 28, check out on March 1 (ha, the same day that Kikin checks out from El Tri and three weeks after Jared Borgetti checked out), one person (unless I can convince some groupie that I'm part of El Tri, I mean, who really knows what Emilio Hassan Viades looks like up close?) and one bed.

But alas, the hotel is booked up for the night. So I looked at the nearest Marriott. I'd still like to have that beer with Kikin, although now I won't be able to drive. The Marriott Del Mar is only four miles away so maybe I could get away with having one beer (one for every goal Kikin scored that mattered in six months in Portugal). Holy crap! Was I in for a shock. Damn Marriott wants $229 a night for a quality room and $259 for the concierge level and since I'm neither quality nor concierge..erly, I chose not to continue with the process.

So I scoured around some more and found the Sheraton in Mission Valley. Okay, it's not the Marriott but it's a nice hotel and - hey! - Venezuela is staying there. Oooh, perfect. Now I'd get some groupie for sure because who the hell knows any player on Venezuela? But then, there probably aren't any Venezuelan groupies so I became sad. Oh well, I still plugged along.

But I hit a roadblock. Damn it. Seems there are no rooms available for Wednesday night. Hmm.. maybe there are groupies there after all. Oh well, I figured I'd give it a shot at the nearest Sheraton until - Holy Smokes! $209 a night for the cheapest room?!? $244 for the most expensive?!? For Venezuela? Couldn't they put them up at a Super 8 motel instead? I mean, come on, it's Venezuela.

In the end, I decided to scrap my idea of staying in a San Diego hotel. Instead, I'll drive back home and try to figure out about how many rooms the respective Venezuelan and Mexican delegations take up, figure about $230 on average per room between the two and see how much it costs to shack up these two teams for one meaningless game. Of course, it's the hard-working, Tri-loving fan who foots this ghastly bill.