Our last vacation involved no home exchange whatsoever. Sigh. My children's grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are lovely people but they live in a region almost devoid of home exchange. Plus, we drive down to the family farm, which involves staying in a hotel for two nights. So no home exchange for us in two weeks away from home.
By the way, did you hear (true story) about the woman who was denied a license plate proclaiming her love of tofu? Her State found the abbreviation she used obscene: "ILVTOFU". F.U. stands for something else in certain circles. So many ways for people to misunderstand each other. Now back to my problems.
Being used to home exchange travel made it really hard to tolerate four nights in a hotel room. The main issue is that we have small children. They are way too little to have their own adjoining room which means we are all crammed into a single room. And when they go to bed -- at 7:30pm -- it's lights out for everyone. Sigh. Plus the space aliens who were almost certainly roaming around put me on edge.
Our daughter is too small to sleep on a regular-height bed, so we got some extra pillows and made a bed for her on the floor of the hotel room. Where hundreds of people tromp in and out with who knows what on their shoes. So I covered the area in which she slept with towels before laying the pillows down. And of course by morning she had rolled away from all her bedding and was face down on the carpet. Sigh.
I pictured some nice exchange home where each child had a separate bedroom, one of which might even contain a toddler bed, or at least a carpet that did not have extremely suspicious brown stains at regular intervals. I wondered why the people of the South were so reticent to swap homes. I considered sneaking into the alien-conspiracist cocktail party happening downstairs. Then I remembered it was a cash bar and changed my mind.
Basically, I couldn't sleep. When this happens in an exchange home I can go into the living room and read the exchangers' books, or watch their television. I can go outside into their garden and look at the stars, or make a snack in their kitchen. In the hotel room the choices were 1) stare at the ceiling or 2) wonder about those carpet stains.
Part of the problem was that I was worried about my car. We were planning to do some bike riding so I had brought my new road bike (Specialized Tricross Sport), plus a trailer to pull the kids. At a home exchange I would have pulled the car into a garage, but the hotels at which we were staying did not have garage parking. It was too tedious to take everything out of the car so we took the bike, clothes and toiletries. We were staying in suburban Washington, DC, a relatively high-crime metropolitan area, and we were almost certainly surrounded by beings from another world. Considering who was at the hotel with us, I wondered all night if the aliens might break in and remove the other items in the car to analyze the recreational customs of our world.
Ultimately they did not, and my daughter did not perish from exposure to alien lifeforms on the carpet. But a home exchange would have been nicer. Southern people, if you are reading this, we come in peace. Please exchange homes with us.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
You can subscribe to this blog to receive each day's post. Just enter your email below :
No comments:
Post a Comment