What a Trip Part I -- The Departure!

We went to visit my husband’s aunt in Texas over Memorial Day weekend. It was a great trip, except getting there and getting home.

We left home at 6 p.m. on Thursday with every intention of making the 10 hour drive straight through. Mind you, we made those plans when we meant to leave at 4 p.m. on Thursday. We had some delays due to last minute shopping and packing, as usual. Anyway, at 6 p.m. we were “On the Road Again” with a car full of luggage and three girls. One sullen (age 18), one whining about leaving her boyfriend behind for 4 days (age 15), and one super duper hyper excited about finding lizards and going on a trip (age 11). After a couple of hours spent fighting with said teens about the music selections (“No, I don’t want to listen to Avenged Sevenfold all the way to Texas.”) we had a fun time singing along with various things until those in the back and my husband all fell asleep.

By the time we reached Edmond, Oklahoma at around 11 p.m., Hubby had been driving for awhile and we were both getting tired. I, the designated and only navigator, was busy studying the road atlas I had prudently purchased prior to our departure. (If you know anything about our honeymoon last December, you know why.) It was then that I determined that if we kept to our planned course we would be driving through Ft. Worth at around 1:00 a.m., and would likely reach his aunt’s house at about 2:30 a.m. She had to work the next day and she had told us that due to the difficulties in finding her place at night, she would drive 15 miles to the nearest town and meet us to guide us there.

I decided at that point that a hotel room for the night would be a better plan. So I got out said trusty road atlas and started calling. Mind you, we were on a VERY tight budget and this was an unplanned expense, so I was looking for a cheap hotel. I called the nationwide 800# for Choice Hotels and told the guy where we were and that we wanted something close to I-35 for under sixty bucks a night. He found an Econo-Lodge that he said was in OK city near I-35 and quoted me $41.00 a night for a non-smoking room with 2 queen beds. He told me that because of the third adult they would require us to have a rollaway bed and pay six dollars extra. I said that was fine. He told me to take exit 142 and the hotel would be within sight of the highway. Within a couple of miles we got to Exit 142, which I thought was odd because I thought we were still in Edmond. But you know how these things go, I just assumed that it was in the Oklahoma City AREA and it was the right exit. So we took it. There was no Econo-Lodge, in fact there was nothing much.

I called the direct phone number to the hotel and got the nice young desk clerk, who spoke with a THICK east Indian accent. It was then that I discovered that the hotel I was reserved at – with no opportunity to cancel at this late hour – was off of I-44 in Oklahoma City. The desk clerk gave me some barely comprehensible directions and we kept on driving south on I-35. We got to the I-44 exit and changed highways heading west. I had been told by the reservations guy that this hotel was CLOSE to I-35. I guess close is a relative term, because it was about 10 miles from I-35. I also found that in Oklahoma the exit numbers get smaller as you go west. Or at least on I-44 they do. We had a LOVELY tour around the OKC convention and visitor’s bureau road construction site. Apparently they have a tourist district there called Bricktown which looked really interesting, except it was nearly midnight, .and there was nothing there but orange barrels and a couple of homeless guys looking for a place to sleep. Creepy. Also the hubby was driving and he does not do navigation, nor does he take directions well unless they are very clear. So there were a couple more wrong turns and some, shall we say, loud discussion. After several more blunders and two more calls to the desk clerk – who sounded eerily like Apu from The Simpsons – we arrived. The score for the first leg: 5 hour trip took us 6 ½ hours.

The hotel was – shall we say – interesting. The clerk was a 20-something sleepy-headed barefoot guy. I am normally quite good with accents but he was hard to understand. It might be the after affects of 5 hours in the car after a hectic day at work.
Got the key and went to our room, where I found 2 DOUBLE beds (not queen), a bathroom so tiny that you could barely sit on the toilet without banging your knees on the tub, and completely useless as a changing room. My middle daughter somehow wedged herself sideways into the tiny closet AREA (no door) to change and we just had all the kids close their eyes while my hubby changed into his PJ’s. It was that or send them out into the creepy muggy hallway.

I finally got into bed, and it was then that the LOVELY articles I had read about bedbugs in hotel rooms while planning our honeymoon in December came back to my memory. Also the time that I was watching Jon and Kate Plus 8 on the Learning Channel and making fun of the mom because she wouldn’t let her kids off the hotel beds unless they had their shoes on. I thought she was stupid. Now I thought she might have a point! Actually, the room wasn’t dirty, it was just very worn, very small, and very hot and muggy. But it felt dirty!

They brought the rollaway bed with sheets and a pillow but no blanket. The beds were as hard as bricks and the whole hotel was musty, hot and sticky. Apparently the owner was trying to save on utility bills by not air conditioning the lobby or other public areas. Our room A/C had not been turned on so it was like an oven. To make a long story short, I slept badly and my hubby didn’t do much better. It took me about 2 hours to quit thinking about crawly things and go to sleep. The bed was hard and too small for us. Our eldest had the best mattress on the rollaway bed, but had to use the blankets we brought because I was too tired to try to make the desk clerk understand what I wanted. The “continental breakfast” amounted to cold cereal, donuts and toast. It also turned out I had to pay 6 bucks for the extra adult PLUS six bucks for the rollaway bed, so I could have stayed at a better hotel for the same amount of money. On the plus side, we were motivated to get up and GO! We were on the road by 9.

The only further adventure on the trip down occurred when we got into Fort Worth. There was an accident on the freeway and traffic was backed up for MILES. As we sat there sweltering on I-35, breathing exhaust fumes and (me at least) trying not to think about the fact that a bathroom break was LONG overdue, I was reminded again why I will NEVER live in a city. Finally in desperation I took the closest exit that had a gas station. I think it was in one of the scary parts of town my father-in-law told us we didn’t want to drive through late at night. I didn’t want to drive through it in the daytime either, but I really had to go. So I pulled up to the station (bars on all the windows) and dashed in to use the loo. The toilet was clean but the walls looked like a mechanic regularly washed up in there. Since I don’t believe in using the bathroom without buying something, I picked up a bottle of Vitamin Water, paid for it and skedaddled. After another 40 minutes or so in the freeway parking lot, we got out of Ft. Worth. We made it to Auntie’s house at 4 p.m. The score for leg 2: 5 ½ hour trip took us 7 hours. But on the plus side, we had lunch and ice cream at a Braum’s, which I hadn’t visited since my senior year of high school on the Oklahoma border. YUM.