My sister is in labor right now with her second kiddo, who will be my second nephew. I honor of my wonderful sister, I thought I’d tell you guys about the one time she SCARED THE CRAP out of me. She’s such a good mom, really…
The story takes place when I was in kindergarten and we lived in the great state of Rhode Island. My sister was in the fourth grade and surprisingly this is not a tale of about how we shared a room for the first (and only) time. Nor, is this the story of us lying in our beds at night making up stories about the super scary Greek tiles that hung on the wall outside of our room. (Although next time I go home to the parent’s house I’ll take photos of those tiles so you guys can be the judge of how frightening they really are.) This story takes place on the road. This story takes place while my family and I were doing that super scary, incredibly creepy act of… driving through New England to look at the fall foliage! DunDunDun!!!! (Insert evil music)
At this time in my life I needed… well structure. I find this funny because now I think I’m a pretty laid back kinda gal. I mean you should see me and Boyfriend try to pick a restaurant some times. I’m all, “I don’t care where we go. Where do you want to go?” Then he says, “Well, what do you want?” “Then I answer, “I don’t care, what do you want?” And this goes back and forth until one of us snaps and finally says something (usually me) and then Boyfriend says “Nah, I don’t want that.”
Anyway, I was not like this as a five year old. As a five year old I went to half a day kindergarten and played the same game on the bus every morning. (Super Mario Brothers) As a five year old I came home every day from kindergarten and my mom made me the same lunch… every day. (Campbell’s Clam Chowder Soup) We did the dishes every day after dinner because we didn’t have a dish washer, and it calmed me that our dog barked incisively at the same squirrels out in our back yard every day. I was good as long as things went according to plan. But, on that cool, autumn day things did not go according to plan…
We got up early and as a family we all piled into the minivan and headed out into the great unknown. I was okay with this because that was that plan. We drove all around New England that day. (So I don’t really remember exactly where or for how long we drove and if I write, “Oh we drove thought New York and Vermont and Maine and heck probably a good 500 miles into Canada” -like I remember us doing- I’ll get a call tonight from my dad correcting me that really we only got to Connecticut, barely.) The point of this story is that we were a ways from our little home and it started to get dark. My parent’s brilliant idea was to simply pull over at the next Holliday Inn and purchase a room for the night.
First hotel…
Parents: “We require a room good sir.”
Hotel Guy: “There’s no room in the inn…”
Second hotel…
Parents: “We require a room good sir.”
Hotel Guy: “Yeah, can’t stay here…” (You should read that in the same voice as the snot kid who tells Forest Gump, “You can’t sit here” on the bus his first day of school. Just FYI.)
Forty Fifth Hotel…
Parents: “Just please let us give you money for a place to stay!!!
”
Hotel Guy: “Look people we are in the middle of prime leaf looking season. Did you honestly think you could just pack up your kids and maybe a few granola bars and be set of the day? Did you honestly think that these trees aren’t pulling in record breaking viewers this year? I mean look outside! Look at those colors! And you people just think you can waltz right in here and get a room like its some slow Fourth of July weekend? Ha! You turrists have a lot of learning to do.”
Parents: “Please we didn’t know… WE DIDN’T KNOW…”
Hotel Guy: “I know. I know. And you know what? I like you two, so I’m gonna help you out. I’m looking here on my computer and it looks like our sister hotel in south New Jersey just might have a broom closet you could sleep in for the night. Let’s see here… its 11:30 now and it takes about 5 hours to get there, so you could get a good 45 minutes of sleep in before they would have to get into that closet to find the waffle irons for breakfast. You better hurry.”
While this lovely conversation is going on in the hotel lobby, this is being said in the car…
Me: “I’m tired…”
Sister: “You know what going to happen, right?”
Me: “Um, no. What? What’s going to happen, Sister?”
Sister: “We are never going to find a place to stay tonight, and you know what that means, right?”
Me: “Mom and Dad will make a reservation? Because if they make a reservation they have to let us sleep there.”
Sister: “They can’t make a reservation for the same night that it is. Don’t you get it? Mom and Dad didn’t make a reservation. They didn’t prepare at all. They failed you. And you know what that means, right?”
Me: “Mom and Dad can fail us? I don’t get it…”
Sister: “IT MEANS WE WILL HAVE TO SLEEP IN THE CAR!!!”
I don’t know if words on the internet can express how much this freaked me out. Sleeping in the car is what homeless people did. Sleeping in the car meant my parents didn’t have all the answers and couldn’t fix everything. Sleeping in the car meant sleeping without my blanket. Sleeping in the car meant it would get really cold. Sleeping in the car meant wondering if our dog would die at home because we weren’t there to let him outside or feed him. In my mind, sleeping in the car was not an option.
But then my parents came out of the hotel lobby and got back in the car without a room key
.
Sister: “So did we get a room?”
Mom: “Nope, not here.”
Dad: “Yeah, this is getting ridiculous. I guess we’ll just have to sleep in the car.”
Parents: “Hahaha!”
And while my parents laughed away their worries in the front seat my sister turned to me and gave me an evil, evil smile…
To this day I don’t like not knowing where I’ll be sleeping. If I’m going over to a friend’s house and they pull out a giant bottle of tequila, I’d like to know if I can crash on the couch or do they have an extra room. When I was dating Ex-Boyfriend we took the train from Berlin to Poland and the first thing I made him do was find us a hotel room. In the back of my mind I knew I had taken a ten hour train to Eastern Europe on a whim, and everything I owned within 3000 miles was in a small duffle bag, but damn it I was going to have a bed to sleep in that night if we had to walk to every hotel and hostel in Krakow!
Oh, and in case you’re wondering we just ended up driving all the way home that scary night when I was five.
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