VACANCY...COME RIGHT IN!

 

I promised a motel story yesterday. Since we travel by car pretty often and we don’t like to be tied down to a specific place or time to stop for the day, we don’t always have reservations.

This story is about one Christmas when we were going from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania to spend the holiday with Mr. B’s folks. We’d planned on making the trip in two days but it was getting late and had started to spit a little snow so we decided to stretch it out one more night.

Trouble was there were folks who did make reservations and hotel rooms were scarcer than pennies during the depression. We were somewhere in Virginia when I saw a miracle. A big motel sign with “vacancy” flashing all pretty and inviting. So we whipped off the highway and drove up in front of the office of this old 50’s style motel.

Not one single car was in the parking lot and that should have been my first clue. I’ll plead weariness and tiredness for my defense at that point.

I hopped out of the pickup truck and went inside where I asked the man for a room with a king-sized bed. He told me it would cost $29.95. Now this was in the days when a good motel ran about $70. I whipped out my credit card and he told me he didn’t take cards, only cash or checks. Second defense item: I’m a sucker for a bargain.

So I told him I didn’t carry cash and I was from southern Oklahoma. He said he would still take a check. Third defense: I was too tired to run and maybe I was being paranoid.

I wrote the check, took my key to the room right next to the office and we unloaded our things. That’s when I usually called the kids to let them know we had stopped for the night (pre cell-phone days) and let them know where we were. Only there was no phone. There was a place in the dust on the table where it used to be and a jack in the wall, but no phone.

So I go back to the office and ask where a pay phone is and make it very clear that I’m calling my children to let them know exactly where I am. He handed me his private cordless phone and said to make the call on it. No charge. Just call. I’d flat out run out of defenses but I wasn’t going to waste $29.95.

I went back to the room to find a movie about to start on the television. Mr. B and I settled in to watch it. Have you ever watched Switchback where Danny Glover is a serial killer?

By the time it was over, I was convinced the guy over there in the office was going to kill me graveyard dead for the Christmas presents in the back of my little red pickup truck. I could hear him over there through the wall, shower running, probably cleaning up from the last kill he’d made right there in Motel Room #1.

However, if I could hear him, then he’d be able to hear me. Right? Made sense to me.

I pulled a chair over in front of the bathroom door, turned on the light and started out to the truck to get the romance book I had been reading. But I could not make myself take a single step out into that cold winter night. Luckily, there was a Gideon Bible in the dresser drawer. By morning I could discuss the book of Exodus with scholars!

Mr. B snored all through the night. I read, watched the clock and flushed the potty every thirty minutes. After all, if I could hear him, he could hear me.

At five o’clock the next morning we left the key where the phone used to be and went on our way. And that feller is probably telling his grandkids stories today about how he rented a room to a chubby gray haired lady who snuck a loud grizzly bear with diarrhea into Motel Room #1 about fifteen years ago.