When I was a carefree young graduate student, the thought of planning a trip in advance seemed ridiculously square. It went against the whole free-spirited aura I was trying to cultivate. As a result, I had lots of bad travel experiences. On the upside, bad travel experiences make for good stories. So sit back and let me squeeze you a bit of lemonade from the lemons life has handed me.
My husband, Rob, used to travel to Payson, Arizona for 10 days every August for work. Most years I would drive up there for a weekend and get a hotel room nearby. I would spend the days hiking the utterly gorgeous Mogollon Rim country, and spend the evenings hanging out with my sweetie.
One year, way back when I was in grad school, I invited my friend Kris to accompany me on this journey. We made the hour-and-a-half drive up from Tempe, spent the afternoon hiking, and met up with Rob when he was finished with work. We all drove into town, figuring we’d just pop in to one of the many motels along Payson’s main drag and get a room for the night.
If we had bothered trying to book a hotel in advance, we would have learned that the World’s Oldest Continuous Rodeo was being held in Payson that very weekend. Now, rodeo has never held a great appeal for me, but apparently it does for a lot of people. Like, enough people to fill every hotel in the entire town of Payson, Arizona.
We found a pay phone with a phone book. This was back in the Stone Age—the mid-1990s—when the Internet was but a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye and mobile phones were only really mobile if you had a car that could tote the weight of their giant batteries.
So a pay phone it was, and Rob located a hotel in Heber, which is the next main town over--with a mere 50 miles of national forest in between. Also, the hotel was rather costly, and we were a bunch of poorly paid college students. But it was our only option.
We hopped back in the car and headed to Heber. Before we got to our hotel, however, we came upon a rather run-down looking motel and decided to inquire about vacancies, hoping they could give us a better deal.
The elderly man at the front desk said he had one room left, and he’d let us have it for twenty dollars—twenty dollars!—but he warned us that it had no TV.
No TV? Who cares about TV? We were there to spend time together! We eagerly forked over $20 and accepted the room.
The old man led us around the side of the building, down a hill, and through a door into a dark basement room. The carpet looked water damaged and smelled like the socks at the bottom of David Beckham’s hamper.
The man escorted us in, apologized again for the lack of a TV, and scuttled away.
The inability to catch the latest episode of Friends (this was the 90s, remember?) was the least of our worries. A quick peek into the bathroom made my bladder try to crawl up next to my lungs. But hey, this was Heber! This was an adventure! And the woods outside were full of wonderful trees to pee on, anyway.
We settled onto one of the beds and Kris pulled out a pack of cards so we could play poker. We decided that whoever was the big loser of the night would have to use the bathroom first. Given my utter inability to bluff, that person was me.
I dropped my glasses on the bathroom floor while getting ready for bed, and when I picked them up they were covered in a layer of cobwebs. My vision is pretty awful without my glasses, but I swear as I squinted at them that something moved.
I left my glasses on the nightstand and went straight to bed. I fell asleep quickly after a long day of hiking in the woods. I awoke—still in the dark—to an odd scraping sound. Terrified, I shook Rob awake. We sat, dumbfounded, trying to figure out what they noise was. Finally we realized it was Kris, dragging her bed away from the wall and into the middle of the room.
“There’s a family of spiders on the wall over my bed,” she explained in a squeaky voice. “I don’t want them eating me while I sleep.”
We survived the night uneaten, checked out in the morning and went on to enjoy the rest of the day. Really, we only needed a place protected from the elements in which to lay our heads for the night. The creatures of our basement room did not appear to enjoy human flesh, so it was probably twenty bucks well spent.
But if you ever try to rent a hotel room and the manager tells you that there’s no television, you might want to ask to see the room before putting your money on the counter.
Even better? Reserve a hotel before you leave home.
--Diane
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