A 'real' hotel wake up call, and a couple good tours

Our reunion's 3:19 a.m. wake up call at the hotel

It’s hard to start a post about a fun day you had on Monday, when a false fire alarm in the hotel woke you up and caused you to walk down six flights of stairs at 3:19 a.m. on Tuesday.

We are staying at the Admiral Semmes Hotel in Mobile, Alabama for our Navy reunion. At 3:19 a.m. (About two hours and 20 minutes ago as I write this) a loud alarm and woman’s voice came on in the dark in our bedroom announcing, “Attention, attention, an emergency has been reported in the hotel, you are to evacuate the hotel immediately. Use the stairs, do not use the elevators.” This continually repeated.

My first reaction was to look out the window and seeing very little action outside ignoring the whole thing. But we thought better of it and got dressed and walked down six flights of stairs (which is not easy for Joan with her bad knee). We did take a couple minutes to get dressed first.

Aboard the USS Alabama



The stairway took us to a back exit of the hotel, out through the pool area and onto an outdoor sidewalk where we found many of my Navy reunion folks.

As we walked to the front of the hotel a Mobile fire truck was driving off. False alarm. Unfortunately, the man working the front desk had no idea how to reset the alarm and make the elevators work again. We decided trying to walk up the six flights of stairs with Joan’s knee might result in an actual emergency so we waited in the lobby, with a lot of other elderly folks, for more than an hour for the security guy to arrive at the hotel and reset everything.

The most distressing part of the whole adventure was hearing the desk clerk tell someone, “it happens all the time.”

So the incident did raise a few obvious questions. One, if it happens all the time, why don’t you fix it? Two, if it happens all the time, why at least don’t you know how to reset it? And most confusing of all is that if you have a hotel with hundreds of rooms on 10 floors why are 80 guests scattered from Floor 6 to Floor 10 and not being housed on lower floors?

Joan and me on the USS Alabama

Tonight, on the last night of the reunion, we are supposed to have a “Mystery Dinner Theater” event. Trying to lighten the mood downstairs while we waited for security to fix the alarm I said: “Maybe this was part of the set up for tonight’s murder mystery.”

One of my crusty old shipmates responded quickly, “If that’s true, then someone is definitely going to die.”



I took a few photos of us all standing around in our mixture of night clothes and other hastily assembled garments.  We finally got back to our rooms about 5:15 a.m. and knowing I would never get back to sleep started writing this post.

Another of our guys mentioned to the clerk that perhaps some accommodation should be made to take tonight’s stay off our bill.

“I’ll talk to the manager,” he said.

“Well, talk to them REAL good,” my shipmate said back.



Lunch in the wardroom

Generally people were in pretty good humor about the whole thing, but we’ll see how much sleeping goes on today as we drive on our tour bus around town.

OK, back to yesterday.

We left the hotel at 8:30 a.m. headed for Battleship Park where we spent several hours touring the USS Alabama Battleship, which is now a museum ship. After getting our fill of touring the ship we had a catered dinner aboard in the ship’s Wardroom, which is where the officers ate when it was an active Naval vessel.

Usually officers eat on fine china, but they served the dinners on the divided metal trays more common to the crew’s mess on a Navy ship. Those of us who were enlisted men offered to show our officer members how to eat off the metal trays.



A cannon demonstration at Ft. Gaines

Following the battleship tour our bus took us to Ft. Gaines on Dauphine Island. The fort, which was first built and occupied in 1819 was part of the Confederate defense of Mobile Bay during the Civil War. It was also an integral part of the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. This was the famous battle in which Admiral Farragut uttered the words, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.”

In those days torpedoes referred to underwater mines, one of which had just blown up one of the ships in the Admiral’s fleet.

The park’s ranger fired off a musket and a small cannon for us (loud noises always amuse sailors) we spent some time visiting the various rooms and museums on the site.

On the way back to the hotel we got a tour of downtown Mobile, including driving near the site of the annual football “Senior Bowl.”

We went to dinner in the hotel and then spent a few hours in the hospitality room visiting with old friends. I’m collecting stories for our next newsletter so it was gold mining for me. Joan went back to the room a couple hours earlier than I did, probably after we had retold the same stories four or five times. I will say that some of the stories are ripening with age.

We went to sleep about 10:30 p.m. and then at 3:19 a.m., well that brings us back to where we began.