the vacation that wasn't

You may recall that just a few days ago, I told y'all I was taking a little bloggy hiatus.

To regroup, decompress, and take a lovely, beachy vaca.

I said I would have my butt firmly planted here:

Instead my butt is firmly planted on my sofa. Sorry, no picture of that, interesting as it sounds.

Please pardon (in advance) the sarcasm. I'm a little bitter.

Here's the story of how my 5 day vacation turned into a 14 hour trip. Yes, you read that right. Start to finish. Fourteen hours. That includes travel time, my friends.

We were late leaving, because we were late getting up, because we went to sleep late because Baby C went to sleep late. Lot's of "because" I know, but it was quite the domino effect. Affect. I'm too lazy to remember which one to use right now. We left our home in (affectionately dubbed by local yokels such as us) G-Vegas around 3 pm, bound for Charleston, about four hours away.

I was really proud of Baby C. It was his first long car ride, and he was awesome! I had no idea what to expect with him being so young. Turns out that was the least of my worries.

So we make it all the way to the coast, we're topping the hill on the IOP Connector and I'm pumped to see the ocean.

That's where all that is good in the world ended. No joke. We pull into our "hotel". I use the term loosely. From the street it seemed tiny, but whatever. It's a hotel. But we pull in to the "parking area" and find that our car (a Honda Accord) barely has enough room to pull in as a Toyota Camry is coming out. It's THAT narrow. Oh, and there are exactly 12 spaces. In one row. On one side. So as you're pulling in, to the left are spaces and to the right are massive round columns. Support columns, seeing as how the "parking area" is under the "hotel". There is no sign of an office. So I stay in the car with Baby C while the hubs goes in hunt of the office. About ten minutes later he emerges and says we're all set, let's just get me and Baby C up to the room and he'll come back for our things. He's awesome like that.

So up we go to the 2nd floor and in to check out our room. At first glance it is what it is--just another non-descript hotel room. Closer inspection reveals a small flock of fruit flies holding court in the shower, the tiniest TV I've seen in a hotel since 1992 (maybe 19 inches, and that's being generous; it was 10 feet from the bed), and a grungy armchair. But it's okay. It's fine. I'm a self-proclaimed girlie-girl who sees no reason why anyone would want to go camping so maybe I'm just being particular.

Until I sit down in said grungy chair to feed the baby and my hubby goes..."Um...what's that on the ceiling...?" I was almost afraid to look up. But I did. The ceiling was lovingly decorated with mold. Powdery round colonies of mold in two foot long strips all over the whole ceiling. I wish I were joking. I'm so not. So my hubs says "okay, that's it, they're moving us to a better room or giving us our money back" and I just nod. I'm so tired and so frustrated. We had just ordered dinner to be delivered from a local restaurant because we were too tired to go anywhere. So I'm waiting for food while hubs is checking with the manager.

Ah yes...the manager. A very nice lady who inexplicably came to check out the mold in BARE FEET. I know it's the beach, but c'mon. You're the manager of a hotel. Flip-flops are fine with me, but you need shoes, mmmmk? So she goes back to the office saying she'll call us right back to let us know what she has available. Minutes after our food arrives, she calls. Says she has the same room on the first floor and she's checked it out, it's great. Fine. Except that we're starving, our food is getting cold, my baby is exhausted, WE are exhausted, and we have 2 tons of luggage to move down a floor to another room.

We make it down to the room in one trip, thanks to the hubby's determination to expedite the process and are helped to our room by another guest who sees me, arms full of baby and baby gear, and hubby struggling with the cart full of our 2 tons of crap. (no one told me just how much crap a baby needs for a vacation, but that's another post in and of itself) So the kind guest says, in his best redneck (and I'm not even joking, I'm Southern as they come and Kind Guest was red. neck. to. the. core.) "whar ye heddin'?" I say "uhhh 111" to which Kind Guest replies "ahhh y'alls next to me!" Goody. Then I feel bad because, hello, he did not have to help us. He could've just watched us run into everything trying to get to our room. But he slung his groceries up on his arms to free his hands and helped us. Thank you, Kind Guest.

We get into 111 and I'm ready to just collapse. It's hot, it's humid, Baby C spit up all over me on the way down to the room, and our food is getting colder by the minute. At this point, it is after 9 pm. We see no mold, no grungy chair. One lonely fruit fly that the hubs quickly disposes of. Fine. I just want to eat and shower and sleep. So we eat. Then we realize...we have no cell service. None. We cannot get a single text or call to go through to our parents to let them know we're there safe. Even the "complimentary wi-fi" doesn't work. So the hubs says, "hey, I'll walk down to the street and call them, you get C ready for his bath so we can all get some sleep." The calls complete, we bathe Baby C and are about to shower ourselves when...cue the "duh duh duh" ominous music...Hubby says "um, do you smell that?"

Yes, in fact, I DO smell that, the lovely potent aroma of marijuana seeping through the crack of the door from the adjoining room belonging to none other than aforementioned Kind Guest. All the rooms have the adjoining doors to be rented as "suites" apparently. Lucky us. Within a few minutes of initially noticing the scent, I feel like I've been transported back to high school with all the pot heads that smoked it every day at lunch in their cars. Now I'm not here to judge or point fingers. I don't care WHAT you do in your spare time, or in this case, in your hotel room. You can hang from the ceiling in purple polka dotted underwear for all I care. But when you're doing drugs, specifically one like this that is flowing into my room where MY BABY is, we're gonna have some problems, mmmk?

At this point, I think hubs' head is about to explode. Truly. Back to the manager he goes, only this time it's a young, long-haired lanky guy, of about 18 or 19, who looks like a pot head himself and comes in our room to see what the fuss is. To his credit, he was extremely nice, and extremely helpful. But this is where my vacation came to an end. He could not do anything to the other guest, because the smell wasn't evident outside of KG's room. Lucky us, we were getting all the fumes. He couldn't call the cops, because there's an 'expectation of privacy' that means they can't go in KG's room without smelling it, and they can't come in ours to check it out and then go check out the other room. Manager also cannot move us (again) because he has no available rooms. So he spends 15 minutes calling every hotel within a 15 minute drive to find us something else. Guess what? There were 2 places that had rooms. But each was only for that night, check out 11 am firm, and no other availability the rest of the week due to some national tennis crap going on. At this point, it's nearly midnight.

So after checking with me, and calling my dad (who graciously paid for this room as a semi-birthday gift to me), hubs informs the kid we'll be leaving immediately. So the hubby goes to get a luggage cart and I pack everything up in record time. At this point, I see a little (big) something and say to hubs, "is that a bug?" Indeed. Nice, fat cockroach. It gets away.

We are on the road by 1 am. Baby C passes out finally (bless it, he tried so hard to stay awake with us) and I guzzle a Red Bull so I can help keep hubby awake. We make it home a few minutes past 5 am, I shower (when I really wanted to boil myself in a cauldron) and we collapse into bed.

So there you have it. Fourteen nightmarish hours and I never even got my toes in the sand. Perhaps the most hilarious part of this story happened later that day when I woke up. We had Chinese food the night before and I forgot to eat my fortune cookie...which is odd, because they are my favorite part of ordering Chinese! So I'm in the kitchen and spy my cookie there on the counter. What the heck, I think, let's have a cookie. I nearly choked on my cookie laughing as I read the fortune:

"Need excitement and adventure? Take a vacation."