Americas Best Value Inn Bloomington, Bloomington

They should be ashamed to have the Ramada name on this place. It's rundown, dirty, generally ill-kept and doesn't even come close to promising what's advertised.

We checked in late on the afternoon of Sept. 11. The unshaven, ball-capped kid at the front counter was very nice and helpful, and that's about all that went right during our stay. The first-floor hallway stank of pool chemicals, and the people next door were already getting loud, so we asked to be moved to another room. The second floor was only marginally better - a little quieter, but still dark and dirty - and I don't know how the stairwell managed to smell like stale cooking grease, because there's no restaurant.

The air conditioner in the room only worked about half the time, and the TV didn't have most of its cable channels. The bathroom wall was cracked, the carpet was filthy, and even the doorknob was sticky; I started to make some coffee the next morning, and the in-room pot was so nasty that I didn't even turn it on.

The pool was locked up because it was, according to the front desk person, "broken." After all of this, I knew "breakfast" would be an experience, and it was; we went into a dirty, cluttered meeting room an hour before "breakfast" time ended and found five stale doughnuts , one English muffin (no toaster though), a dirty microwave, two apples and a little hopper of cereal, about half of it spilled over the countertop. There were two coffee pots out with about an inch of coffee in each one.

We had a conversation about this with the front-desk clerk at checkout, and the woman in line behind me added that some loud guests had checked in next to her at three-thirty in the morning and stayed noisy till five-thirty, even though she'd asked the desk twice to quiet them down.

So the quick summary would be:

Dirty, rundown, smelly building - there's even rotten wood hanging off the side entranceway
Dirty, rundown room
Loud neighbors
No pool
No HBO, most cable channels out
Air conditioning went on only when it felt like it
No breakfast

Even the Motel 6 next door looked nicer than this dump. We'd stayed at a Baymont Inn in Washington, Ind. the night before for about the same price and had the exact opposite experience - it was roomy, light, pleasant and, above all, clean. This was not the first Ramada Express we've stayed at around the country, but it was by far the worst.