Yuck

Well, I finally did it. I'm in a Holiday Inn in south-central Louisiana and I swam in their pool. For the record, that's ME -- doing water-based exercise -- while on travel.

Unfortunately, the conditions weren't that great. The pool was big enough (barely), but the visibility was almost 4 ft. For you non-divers, we measure water conditions in terms of visibility: How far can you see while you're underwater. In the freshwater lakes I usually dive in vis is from 0' to 2'. In the Gulf it varies between 40 and 60'. In the Caribbean it's often 100-120'. The hotel pool was so turbid I couldn't clearly see my feet while I was floating on the surface, feet down.

I was going to use the treadmill, but it was broken. I considered running, but the only road is an Interstate access road and one of our team members was very nearly struck by a car running it this morning. So I'll probably swim it again, since I've dived in bodies of water I'd normally never consider swimming in, and braved God-knows-what kind of amoebas, planaria, and what-not without a thought. At least with a little chlorine the bacteria might be too stunned (stoned?) to hurt me.

This hotel sucks. I'm going to post bad things about it on travel websites to warn others away.