The Traveling Insominac

Recently, my brother-in-law suggested I devote my blog to hotel and motel reviews based on my notoriously trouble-prone visits to such fine establishments (you guys remember when a raging redneck woman and her seven foot tall, taco-eating, cowboy boyfriend tried to beat me up at a hotel?). While the idea has a certain bit of merit, I'm not quite all in because of two reasons: 1) I don't want to sleep my way across the country (you know what I mean!); and 2) I pretty much don't sleep in hotels because the crazies and screamers always seek me out. I guess I'm a crazy magnet.

Be that as it may, I've deemed myself "the Traveling Insomniac." Case in point...

Couple weeks ago, my family and I found ourselves hunkered in at The Rodeway Inn in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Now, Broken Bow is near both the Texas and Arkansas borders, so you can pretty much guess what the townsfolk are like (or at least the ones I kept running into at the hotel). Masks were nowhere to be found and accents were so thick, you could cut them with a chainsaw.

Upon entering our hotel room, I plopped down on the bed to test it out. Suddenly, thunder boomed. Or I'd been magically transported to a bowling alley as echos bounced, rumbled, and crashed through the room. Upon further inspection, the box spring appeared to be a metal filing cabinet. All of the rooms had these hollow, metal "box springs." Clearly, the hotel owner got a good deal at an office supply store fire sale.

My wife had business to attend to in town, so she stranded me in the room. Well, I thought, at least I have the TV to keep me company. When I turned it on, polka music blared out of the speaker. A huge, grimacing old guy in a red suit was torturing his squeezebox and grimacing down at a poor woman, sweating all over her like the alien queen drooling onto Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. The credits came up: "Big Joe Polka Show Classics."

When I tried to change the channel with the remote, Big Joe went nowhere. Desperate, I tackled the buttons on the side of the TV. Still nothing but Big Joe polkaing his way into my nightmares. Truly I was in Motel Hell.

When I turned the TV off, some guy started screaming outside, pounding on a nearby door. His continued rant of "Hey! I ain't no peepin' Tom! Hey! Hey! I ain't no peepin' Tom! Hey!" hardly lent him credibility as to his peeping Tomlessness. Regardless, whoever was behind the door felt the same way as he finally left unfulfilled.

There were quite a few suspect fellow motel inhabitants. One old guy decked out in camo kept walking by our open door and peering inside. Maybe he was the "Not No Peepin' Tom" guy. I'll never know and I sure wasn't going to ask.

Later that night, nearing the wee hours, I began to drift off. But it didn't hold, as people started yelling. Worse, there was a small dog yipping above us, little paws click-click-clicking across the uncarpeted floor. Not to be outdone, a large dog started barking next to us. In some colossal inside joke of the Fates, my wife and I had been placed in the "Dog Wing," while the rest of the family had nice, quiet rooms.

After very little sleep, the next morning I dragged my way to the coffeemaker, my only salvation. Yet the tray to hold the coffee was missing. My wife told me to just go next door to the combination casino/convenience store to get some coffee.

"Unacceptable," I shouted. "The hotel already lied about the free breakfast (everything was under construction), so I'm not about to give up on my coffee! It's one of my rights as a hotel-stayer! First Polka Joe, then the not-a-peeping-Tom, then the dogs, then--"

"Yes, dear."

Grousing and grumbling, I stumbled my way to the front desk. Except the back door was locked. Freezing, I walked around the building to the front door. Only no one was there. "Back in a minute" stated a hastily scrawled message on the desk. So I waited. And waited. And waited...

Finally--FINALLY!--a young woman wearing her daisy dukes cut-off shorts (who should've known better) trots in through the previously locked back door. Smiling, she says nothing. For whatever reason, the onus was on me to start the conversation.

"Hi. Um...do you work here?" I had to ask, because daisy dukes hardly seemed like professional hotel attire.

"Yeah." Still grinning at me, she offered nothing else.

"Okay, well, my room doesn't have a coffee tray. Could I bother you to get one?"

"Well, I would, but I'm locked out of there." She hitched a thumb toward the front desk. "There's supposed to be somebody else here."

"Huh." Clearly, Hell was shoving me into round two. None of this made any sense, particularly to my addled brain.

"Somebody should be here soon," she says.

So, again we waited. And waited. And waited...

"I guess someone decided to sleep in this morning," I offered.

"I guess. I'll bet things were pretty rowdy here last night."

"You could say that again," I said (hoping she wouldn't, so I don't know why people use that tired cliche). 

"Last weekend, we had to call the cops, 'cause ever' body got drunk by the pool (which was closed and "under construction") and started just a'wailin' on each other."

"Sorry I missed that," I said. "But I sure didn't miss all the dogs last night."

"Oh, yeah." That one really put a smile on her face.

At long last, some other guy (again in shorts!) shows up and unlocks the front desk door. I explain to him my coffeeless problem. They appeared to be at a loss as to where to find a tray.

"Well, how about I just get a new coffeemaker?" I asked.

At their wits end, they finally tell me that they'll bring a tray to my room. Thirty minutes later, the tray was delivered. Right at the moment when I was finally falling asleep to the dulcet sounds of Big Joe and his polka horrors.

While not quite as nightmarish as my recent motel stay, nightmares do abound in Dread and Breakfast, probably one joint you might want to avoid if you value your life. 

 

Adventures in the Amazon Day Seven: Piranha Fishing!

After another night of sleeplessness in the jungle, we... Oh. Wait. Did I not tell you the unfortunate sleeping circumstances of our lodgings?

You see, the Heliconia Lodge is very nice, offers great food, and the staff is top-notch. 

But seeing as we're in the jungle, of course, air conditioning is unheard of. Electricity, too, for the most part, which is why the lodge runs off a generator. Naturally it wouldn't make much sense to run it full time, so they turn it off three times a day, usually when I wanted to shower.

(Side note on showering: Our first day at the Heliconia, we kept going out on excursions and each time I'd soak through my clothes. Not by rain, mind you, but sweat. So I kept showering and changing clothes. Six wardrobe changes in one day, I felt like Cher in Vegas. By the next day, I pretty much just gave up on hygiene. Sure, you didn't want to sit downwind of me, but everyone in our group was in the same boat. Literally.).

Anyway, I could live without electricity during the days. We were never in our room anyway. But then they'd power down the generator every night at midnight. The room fans would stop as the entire compound ground down with a dying, monstrous groan: pretty much an alarm clock to jolt me awake. I usually clocked in a solid 45 minutes before the generator stopped.

In bed. NEVER asleep!

Then nature's sound machine took over, keeping me up most of the night. (And the endless sweat, natch. In fact, I've come up with the perfect slogan for the Heliconia Lodge: "At Heliconia, we sweat the hell outta you!")

What does nature's sound machine sound like, you ask? Kinda like this (ahem)...

"OOOH, OOOH, AHHH, EEEK, EEEK, EEEK, OOT, OOT, AHHH, OOOT, HOOO, HOOOO, OOOOOO, EEEK, EEEEK, AIEEEEE..."

You get the drift. Some kind of unidentified bug/animal/monster took to haunting me right outside our room: it sounded like a blacksmith pounding out metal. Also, I was too busy wondering what sort of varmints were scampering around in our dark room to sleep. The horror stories about scorpions, tarantulas, and snakes didn't help.

So. Sleep deprived, missing the wonders of air conditioning and quiet, we wandered once again into the jungle on a medicinal plant trail, great for pharmacists, exhausting for we mere authors. 

Antonio using his version of G.P.S.: "Great Product of Survival"

However, we did something very cool. We planted mango trees in the Amazon jungle in honor of Earth Day. I'll gladly brave the sleepless nights, nocturnal monsters, and near death experiences by visiting again in five years to eat a mango from our tree.

Cool was the order of the day as later we went out piranha fishing. Danger's my middle name (not really, not even close).

Time and time again on our trip, we'd been told piranha were good to eat. I'd never realized piranha was an edible fish, just sort of thought of it as an eating fish (remember: movies are my education). I kinda think it might just be practical on the Peruvians' behalf to eat what they have plenty of (otherwise I'm completely baffled by the choice of goat's head soup). Oddly enough, though, it was never offered to us at the lodge. But we were prepared to catch dinner for everyone.

Off we went on our fishing expedition! I warned everyone I was prepared to fall. They all agreed, hardly a shocker. 

Before the fishing trip with happy and high expectations!

Hooks were baited, lines were sunk, and we waited. And waited. And waited, just merrily bob-bob-bobbing along. The blasted piranha kept nibbling at our bait, just eating it. Our buddy fed the piranha a lot (next fisherman: "Man, that's one fat fish.").

Only one of us snagged a piranha (teacher's pet, teacher's pet, teacher's pet!), a small one at that. 

Expectations dashed!

Still, all in all, how very awesome it is to snootily drop into conversation, pinky finger raised, "The other day we were on the Amazon River, fishing for piranha..."

While we're on the subject of sharp toothed critters, check out the second in the Zach and Zora comic mystery series, Murder by Massage. My hapless heroes face all sorts of shark-toothed, crocodile-teared types such as
dancing cops, ex-radical hippy militants, pompous pastors, and a creepy set of "Furries." What're you waiting for? The party's started and it's a blast!