Hello from the worst place on Earth

How I accidentally spent my last day in the country at the Trump International Beach Resort: a Hotwire horror story.

Thanks, I hate it

Please excuse this brief pause in our regular scheduled politics programming—I’m in the middle of an international move and need to share how I accidentally ended up at the last place that I would ever willingly spend my last night in the United States.

Pedro didn’t want to go in.

First, it is really fucking stressful trying to get a dog to Brazil. You have to spend over a thousand dollars just to get the necessary health paperwork signed by a pet travel specialist and then endorsed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture within 10 days of your flight. Government departments are notoriously backed up and unreliable, so they still might just not get you the certificate in time. Also, you can only bring a dog on the plane as an in-cabin pet if you’re flying on both a Latin American airline and aircraft—not, say, a Colombian airline that partners with Delta. I have heard too many stories about dogs getting hypothermia or even dying when people put them in cargo on a long flight. I’d rather row a canoe to Brazil myself and risk getting bombed by my own military for being a “drug boat” on the way than put my 20-pound dog under the plane. All of this severely limited my flight options.

So the unhinged travel route I had to book required us to fly to Miami, spend 1.5 nights in a hotel, and then take a 3 am flight to Rio that connects in Bogotá. I decided I was going to use this full layover day in Miami to find the best dog beach in the city and really wear Pedro out in the sun and sand before he has to travel in a bag for 12 hours. The best dog beach I could find in Miami was in Haulover Park, on North Beach, so I aimed to stay near there. But the nice hotels around the beach are really expensive—and especially unaffordable amid the Miami Swim Week festivities, where every reality TV influencer apparently walked the runway this year. Some of the 2-star and 3-star hotels I found in area looked fine to me, but I got spooked by reviews warning of things like rooms smelling like bleach or sewage and the constant sound and view of construction outside the windows. It being my last day in the country, I really wanted to have a relaxing and nice time. So I went on Hotwire.

For the uninitiated, the deal with Hotwire is that you can get big discounts by booking a hotel blind, meaning you don’t know exactly which hotel you’re booking. Hotels put their empty rooms on Hotwire at low prices they don’t want to be associated with by name online, because then they’d have trouble selling their other rooms for the standard price. You can search for particular areas of a city and amenities and numbers of stars, and you can see very general reviews of the place, but you can’t know the name of the hotel until after you book it. Unfortunately, the “area” search tool is quite broad and encompasses multiple neighborhoods, so it’s not that easy to narrow down for yourself exactly where you want to be. But I found a 4.5-star hotel on there that was pet friendly, in the general region of Haulover Beach, had good reviews, and was about $300 off the regular room price. A “hot rate,” they called it. So I booked a “bay view” room and carelessly waived the $30 fee that lets you cancel once you find out the name of the hotel. I didn’t consider that the Trump International Beach Resort was even one of the options, because I’d missed it on the map.

Of course, the big reveal happened and that’s the one I had booked for two nights. It was non-refundable. I arrived at midnight in a thunderstorm. Here’s the tacky marble and bronze lobby.

The place looks and feels like it’s stuck in the 80s. It smells too strongly of a floral perfume. There’s Trump merch everywhere, including Trump hats and Trump wine and Trump-branded water bottles in the room. Walking past this cabinet on the way to find my room was when I started to want to die.

My room had faux alligator-skin walls and a view of a strip mall, a parking lot, and, sure, the bay. Pedro immediately vomited and had diarrhea on the carpet, which I swear I did not intentionally allow to happen (I tried to clean it myself and gonna leave a massive tip for housekeeping!) but was darkly funny.

Almost shared the photo of his vomit stain on the carpet but I’d still like to have subscribers.

There’s a creepy sanitary arcade on the second floor that looks like it’s never been used, playing late-80s techno music inside of a room with no people in it. It would almost be cool if it didn’t feel like a horror movie about clowns in there.