What I did on my Summer Vacation

I want to talk about motels. The thing about motels is that you have to suspend your analytical nature along with your natural squeamishness about that wonderful, invisible-to-the-naked-eye world of germs and bacteria. You really can't think too hard about who else has used the room, what they've done there, and what bodily fluids they've left behind. But as long as a room looks clean, I'm OK with it. I even managed to cope when I found a black hair in the bathtub (our hair is red or gray, or sometimes, red and gray) of one motel, and another where I had to pick a hunk of unidentifiable food off the front of the microwave. It wasn't easy, but I took deep breaths and got by it.
And this is another thing about motels and hotels that I have always wondered about: Why do they fold the toilet paper into that little point? Sure, it's nice, but wouldn't one feel more reassured about cleanliness if one knew that the maid's hands weren't all over the toilet paper? I'm just saying.....
Anyway, we just got back from Lenox, MA, having gone up there to see the BSO (that's Boston Symphony Orchestra for the culturally deprived), at Tanglewood. As usual, I'd made reservations online at a place we'd stayed at previously and liked. Or so I thought. However, a menopausal mind is a forgetful mind. Sometimes, it is a downright absent mind. Because when we arrived in Lenox, we whizzed right past the motel we'd stayed at before and arrived at The Knight's Inn. I suspected right away that no self-respecting knight had ever stayed there. I realised that I had gotten the motel names mixed up. I had meant to make reservations at the Yankee Inn, and I'm sure it is apparent to all how Yankee and Knights could be mixed up.
Now I love curry (No, this isn't a flight of ideas, I'm going somewhere with this), but I love curry in the context of eating it in a nicely appointed Indian restaurant. To smell curry when one walks into a motel registration office is disconcerting, to say the least. As I waited for the clerk (who also smelled of curry), I noticed the Fruit Loops and corn flakes sitting in partially open bins in the adjacent "Continental Breakfast" nook, and idly wondered how curry-flavor enhanced Fruit Loops might taste. I decided not to find out. I may eat a grape that has fallen briefly onto my kitchen floor. I may eat an unidentified tablet off the windowsill.* But one has to draw the line somewhere.
Things didn't improve when we hit the room.It was a little too small. It was a little too shabby. It was a little too orange. It was a little too not too clean. On the inside of the bathroom door were posted instuctions on how to lock it. However, the bathroom door had no handle on the inside, the management missing the point that if you feel the need to post instructions on how to work the door handle, there should, really, be a door handle. Three lightbulbs were burnt out and there were only four total. We had no view of the pool. Because there was no pool.
I looked longingly down the street at the pool flanking the Yankee Motel. I looked at my curry-scented room. I looked at the Yankee Motel. I looked at my curry-scented room. Throwing monetary caution to the wind, I left Curryland and booked a room at the Yankee. A woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do.

* That is another story that will be told, eventually, in The Evil Twins Blog.