It is better, I think, that our daughter Georgie act as our travel agent these days, given the fact that we’re so forgetful now we tend not to remember where we’re going. Truth to tell, even in my prime I couldn’t be trusted in this regard, my urge to economize placing beyond reach most of the necessities that people have come to expect when traveling here or abroad.
Dare I say, though, that the gallows humor that has arisen from our stays at cheapo motels, repurposed houses of ill repute, and seedy Vrbos has made even more diverting these memories than if we’d stayed at four or five-star hotels or resorts? No? Well, anyway, here are a few:
We were at the Town House Motor Inn in Oneonta once, for a field hockey Final Four, I believe, and, in the wee hours there was an awful commotion — its being a college town — during which Mary heard a young man yell out, “You’re nothing but a whore, you know that?” and the young woman’s indignant reply, “But you hardly know me!”
Then there was that Vrbo apartment in Dublin, which did not come as advertised. The bed, from which we figured our landlady had just emerged and had fluffed up, took up most of the bedroom, the rest of which was taken up by the armoire. Scattered throughout the overstuffed place were frilly, uplifting sayings, the kind that tend to give you the creeps, like “I deserve the very best, and the very best is now.”
“We deserve the second-best and the second-best is now!” I called out to Mary from the bathtub shower where I’d slipped on a mat possibly dating to the Precambrian age. “Watch it when you step into the bathtub . . . we were all slime mold once, you know, 500 million years ago.”
Yes, yes, she said, she knew.
In Paris — ah, Paris! — we bedded down in a shriveled fourth-floor garret at Des Marronniers on the Left Bank, in the shadow of Saint-Germain-des-Près. A sign in the narrow hall said something to the effect that if there were a fire you should run. Actually, a fire alarm did go off the first night we were there, at about 4:30 a.m. Everyone trooped down the stairs in their bedclothes only to be told by a smiling clerk that the good news was the alarm was coming from down the block and that the bad news was breakfast wouldn’t be served until 7.
Earlier, Mary, after I’d exclaimed that our room “even has a bath!” had gone down to see if we couldn’t get a larger one, and was told by the clerk, after leafing studiously through the reservation book, that, indeed, there was one.
“Oh good,” she said. “When can we have it?”
“In exactly one month.”
Stick with me, baby. And remember, we’ll always have the Super 8.