Business travel varies in quality. Sometimes, you’re meeting old friends in Paris to dine by moonlight on a soft September evening. Other times, you’re driving a rented Chevy Malibu in sub-zero temperatures from O’Hare to Warsaw, Indiana, only to spend a week shuttling from the hotel to the office to Bennigan’s, while experiencing a miscarriage.

Don’t tell me that has never happened to you.

This recent trip, while not of the moonlight-in-Paris variety, has been pretty pleasant. The conference presentations have been well above average. There is a terrific full-service gym attached to the hotel. The hotel itself is absolutely beautiful in a very old-fashioned, stately way. I’m sitting here

lobby

in the impressive 19th-floor lounge looking through the French doors over the cityscape drinking complimentary champagne as I review my slides for tomorrow. I’m idly wondering why I never ventured into this hotel the entire time I lived in Philadelphia, despite the fact that I worked one block away. I decide to Google a photo of the lounge to send to Husband, who has spent his evening wrangling a cranky toddler.

I Googled, then I smacked my head. Of course. Legionnaire’s Disease. I remember seeing it on the news as a child. The hotel loomed in my memory like the lodge in The Shining. It was closed when I lived here, a ghost structure emblematic of the failure and decay that plagued Center City during the mid-eighties. It wasn’t just a case of an unfortunate outbreak at the wrong time; the source of the bacteria was eventually traced to the hotel’s cooling system.

Still beats the Warsaw Miscarriage Tour.