Photo from the honeymoon suite

My husband and I so rarely travel without the kids that for our long weekend we decided not to bring the tent but to treat ourselves to a nice hotel. (I sleep great in a tent but Spouse is a light sleeper who very much prefers a bed.) Unfortunately, when you plan your vacation around a place with great hiking trails, you can end up in the middle of nowhere, where nice hotels are scarce, or even non-existent. The room we were given when we arrived on Thursday night in Town Named After Dead Animal Parts looked nothing like the photo we had seen on the internet. The bed was a cross between a broken trampoline and a medievel instrument of torture.

We decided the next day over breakfast to complain to the owner of the motel about the bed that seemed designed to cause backaches. The owner turned out to be a very excitable man who was horrified that we were thinking of checking out of his fine establishment. He gave us a long speech about the type of customers he usually gets – by his account, boorish party types who sometimes arrive with kegs and who spill chicken wings on the bed -- and he kept saying things like, "Yeah, that bed's probably 20 years old." At least he was honest. And an optimist as well. He followed his tirade about what horrible things customers do to the beds with the hopeful line, "Did you notice that the TV is new? Brand new TV."

Finally, he walked us over to another building and offered us his "honeymoon suite." I’m not sure why it was called a suite, since it was just one room, but it did have a king-size bed with a firm mattress, big mirrors, nice wallpaper, and a jacuzzi in the corner, a huge improvement over the dark little room we had stayed in the night before. Both the teenage girl who was cleaning the rooms and the owner's wife had trailed along to see how we would like the honeymoon suite, and they kept smiling and winking, and saying, "Oh, you'll like it."

Since my husband and I are in our mid-forties and have been married for 22 years, I doubt anyone thought we were actually on our honeymoon, but we saw no reason not to graciously accept the upgrade. The teenage girl with the cart of mops said as she left, "Didja want me to close the drapes for ya?"

It was a cold, grey morning with a drenching rain, so we abandoned the idea of an early hike in favor of enjoying the honeymoon suite. I did wonder what to do with the digital camera, since I had planned to take a whole bunch of photos while we were hiking. I had promised my readers a photo, so I had this sense of obligation. I offered to take a photo of my husband in the jacuzzi, explaining to him that my blog audience was almost all women, they would just love such a shot, and he could be the first man to post nude for the blog. He turned down my generous offer to make him famous, and offered to take a photo of me instead. The tub was slow to fill so he snapped a photo of me balanced on the edge, waiting impatiently for the water to be high enough so we could turn the jets on and see how it worked. Then we put the camera away for the rest of the morning.