hotels

From the hotel: can I please leave this room?

2000-12-27T02:26:45+00:00

I've had another flight canceled out from under me today. The airport is still shut down. I've been rescheduled on another airline on Thursday evening.Cabin fever is starting to set in. I had to go out to the other hotel for lunch today. My hotel is midway up on a hill, and does not have a restaurant. The next hotel over…er, well…UP…had a restaurant. Normally, going from one hotel to the other would take maybe twenty seconds. Today it took twenty minutes.

I slid across the parking lot, then wrapped my arms around the guardrail to bodily haul myself up the stairs. Mental note #1: how do hockey players deal with this all the time? Mental note #2: why didn't the hotel salt or sand these stairs and the parking lot?

The lunch was good. Well, decent, anyway. To avoid the crush of iced-in families in the main part of the restaurant, I sat at the bar. The young man who plopped down next to me explained, in the chatty way that people sitting in restaurant bars have, that he was a newlywed waiting for a flight out so that he and his new wife could go on their honeymoon. She showed up a few minutes later, and we all chatted as we ate.

I made sure to order enough food so that I wouldn't have to go out again for dinner. I boxed up the extra food and then went back outside…where I promptly fell down.

I ended up sliding across most of the top parking lot on my ass. Seriously. It was easier than trying to walk/slide/skate down. Once faced with the stairs again, I wrapped my arms around the stair rails and gingerly lowered myself down a step at a time, praying for mercy and unbroken bones until I reached the bottom parking lot. I got myself back to my room, cursing my now freezing and wet ass, and promptly changed into my pajamas so that my jeans could dry.

I took a nap, played computer games, called some friends, damned the phone bill I knew would be coming, and did my best not to go stir-crazy. Judging from Andy and Dan's laughter at me, I think I'm failing in that wish.

Brr. I think I need to turn the heat on again. It's getting chilly in here.

Sigh. There is something about the impersonal blankness of a hotel room that, when you're forced to stay in it for days at a time, eats into your soul. I find myself wishing for touches of comfort—pictures and art on the walls, cats twining around my feet or snuggling in my lap. A phone that occasionally rings, with friends on the other end of the line. A kitchen with real food—not candy and chips and other crap that I'm getting from the vending machine.

I want to be able to leave this room and go places without endangering my health or my life. I think I would make a very lousy Canadian.

From the hotel: geek, stranded

2000-12-26T03:17:55+00:00

Well, that answers that question. The Little Rock Airport is, effectively, shut down. No flights will be entering or leaving. I will be here another day. So I've done what every stranded geek would do: get a long shower, watch a couple of sappy movies, and fired up the laptop and started writing.

Looks like I'm getting an enforced vacation. Looks like I'm going to have plenty of time to write tomorrow.

From the hotel: stupid ice storms

2000-12-25T22:02:47+00:00

This won't get posted until after I get home.
Whenever that is.We woke up this morning to the beginnings of a freak ice storm. As we checked the weather, I began to panic. From what we were reading, this was going to be a monster of an ice storm—with the roads becoming impassable until around Thursday, or so people were guessing.

The thought of missing almost a full week of work—after the catastrophe that was last week—horrified me. Jeff, being the eminently sensible one in this marriage, kept saying, "I'm not going to try to drive in any of this. I'm going to stay at your parents' until the roads clear."

An explanation—we drove Jeff's truck out to Arkansas. It's a rear-wheel drive, like most trucks, and it doesn't have an all-wheel-drive option. It's worse than useless on ice-covered, hilly roads—it's a death trap. Given that my parents live in a very rural and hilly section of their county, they are usually some of the first people iced in, and some of the last to get out again.

It occurred to me that if I could get to Little Rock, and stay there, that I could probably catch a flight to Huntsville more quickly than Jeff would be able to get out of Tull.

I found a $400 flight that would get me to Huntsville tomorrow morning. It leaves here at seven a.m. I don't know if the flight will take off on time or not, but if the flight is canceled, I can get a refund and I'm out no money.