It’s something of an emotional farewell.

Before we arrived in Indiapolis, we booked several nights online at a hotel that, for  reasons that are about to become clear, I won’t mention by name.

Normally we book the absolutely cheapest room we can find–at least the cheapest room that is non-smoking, includes Internet access so Neil can log into work, and seems half-way clean and safe.

Based on these high criteria, we have managed to stay in some doozies.

“The cheapest room in town” is quite often under an Interstate, or in an industrial park, or surrounded by strip malls.  We wind up staying in neighbourhoods that are conveniently located for travelers seeking payday loans, Harley Davisdon accessories and tattoos, but not necessarily for finding independently-owned organic vegetarian cafes or going for a nice walk.  Then again, we’ve stayed in rooms for as little as $28/night.  For safety and vegetables, you pay extra.

So, following standard protocol, we booked a cheap hotel room, sight-unseen.

At extended stay hotels, we usually stay in a very modest studio room.  This particular property only had smoking studios available when we booked, but they had a great deal of a non-smoking Queen Suite, so we nabbed it.

And when we arrived, we fell in love.

This “suite” is bigger than several of the apartments we’ve lived in.  Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean this is big: our first apartment was a studio of about 400 square feet.  Unlike most apartments we’ve lived in, the suite’s kitchen has counter space.  (Who builds all these kitchens with no counter space? They drive me crazy.)  And there’s more storage space than the house my family lived in when my brother and I were babies.

There’s even a pull-out sofa!

Okay, the presence of a sofa may not impress you luxury travelers out there, but you have to picture a typical day for us in a hotel studio: Neil is sitting on the only chair in the room programming all day, which leaves me sitting on the bed, ALL DAY.  I don’t mind; I’m bed-oriented.  I’d go so far as to say that beds are my natural habitat. But to be in a suite with a sofa, and be able to get out the bed and sit on actual furniture during the day…I’m telling you, it is the lap of luxry.

We checked into the room and we were awestruck.  We rhapsodized about the size, the space, the sweet spectacular splendour of it all.

In my family, when you really love something, you give it a name.  (Or when you loathe it.  Or sometimes when you’re luke-warm on it.  We’re pretty big on naming, now that I think about it.) Neil and I cast about for a name for the hotel.  We started to call it the “Taj Mahal,” in deference to the pinnacle of luxury it represents.

But “Taj Mahal” is already taken (obviously), and the name just seemed inadequate.

And then Neil had a stroke of brilliance: we could combine “Taj Mahal” and “Indianapolis” to make “Taj Mahapolis.”

And thus the monicker was born.

Why won’t I reveal to you the actual name of the Taj Mahopolis?

Once we were here a few days, we noticed the stink of garbage in the halls, the TGI-Fridays level of customer service, the deeply frightening stain on the boxspring.  The furniture is chipped, the baseboards are scuffed, the wallpaper seams are peeling.  The decor is a depressing mixture of sad beiges and washed-out blues.  In short: it’s the kind of hotel that men check into when their wives kick them out for having an affair.  A real up-beat kind of place.

And even factoring in the smell, the drab interior, the lackluster service: it is still one of the nicest places we have stayed in a year. Which Neil and I find hysterical. As dumpy as it is, it’s the Taj Mahopolis to us.

Tomorrow we check out and head to Peoria, on our way to Minnesota.  The Taj Mahopolis has been good to us.  We will miss it.

I hope, no matter what your circumstances in life may be, that you can always enjoy the Taj Mahopoli that come your way.

We had a good visit  with our sister-in-law Paige, our nephew Tyler, and Paige’s mom Donna in Seymour, Tennessee on Thursday, but Paige and Tyler both have hacking coughs (or, in Paige’s words, “the crud”), so we got a little room in Knoxville for the night. (It was enough of a dump that we won’t be reviewing it, but we sure got a great price on the room!)

Paige has been trying to take us to take us to The Old Mill restaurant in Pigeon Forge ever since we visited last fall: we tried twice last year, and every time the wait for a table was well over an hour, sometimes as long as two.  Thursday was our third try, and maybe because we had Donna along for good luck, we finally got to eat there. You order your own entree and the sides are served family-style, in big bowls for the table to share.  Dinner was very reasonably priced and included a bowl of their house corn chowder, green salad, corn fritters, and a choice of three deserts.  While this might not be an optimal dining location for vegetarians or people with restricted diets, we managed just fine. (My heart goes out to vegetarians in the South, it truly does.) Take a look at The Old Mill recipe page if you want to try some Tennessee country cooking at home.

(Pigeon Forge sports possibly the highest billboard density of anywhere I’ve ever traveled; after driving along tree-upholstered interstates for several days in a row, the contrast is a little over-stimulating.)

We managed to put in 8 hours of driving yesterday, traversing almost the full width of Tennessee.   After a full day of map reading, the Tennessee’s trapezoidal shape really reminds of the Pink Pearl erasors we had when I was in elementary school. 

We started the day with breakfast in a Knoxville Cracker Barrel. Not familiar with Cracker Barrel? Just like Piggly Wiggly, you really have to see it first hand to believe it.  We’ll write more on Cracker Barrel in a future post. (More on our dietary restrictions in a future post, too.) Suffice to say that trying to eat a gluten-free, corn-free, meat-free breakfast at a restaurant that prides itself on its generous portions of biscuits, cornbread and pork products is a great way to avoid over-eating.

We stopped in Nashville for an Indian vegetarian buffet lunch at Woodlands. I realize that vegetarian Indian food is a far cry from typical local cuisine, but we are rapidly approaching our lifetime quota of Cracker Barrel meals, we were craving vegetables, and accommodating our dietary restrictions on the road can be very challenging.  The food was great, and their dosas (rice crepes) were amazing, even if Neil wound up with a very limited number of dishes he could eat. 

(Why are there so many Indian buffet restaurants named Woodlands?  I’ve eaten at oodles but I’ve never figured out why the name is so common.  Does anyone know?)

We drove straight through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, into Arkansas, and on to Little Rock.  (We’ve visited Memphis before, years ago, and since we’re trying to make good driving time right now we didn’t feel compelled to stop this time around.)

We enjoyed a light, if late, Turkish dinner in Little Rock at Istanbul Mediterranean–and throughout the meal thought of our friend Sean-Paul Kelly who is in Turkey at the moment. SP, if our menu last night was in any way representative of Turkish food, I am newly and even more deeply jealous of your trip!

There was so much severe rain and thunderstorms predicted for Tenessee yesterday that we thought we might have to put pontoons on the Mini to clear the state.  We were delighted to discover that, even in some fairly heavy rains, the humidity felt lower than in Charleston or Richmond.  The weather also feels subjectively much cooler without the humidity: yesterday we were stretching  our legs in an Arkansas rest stop and felt comfortably cool, even though it was 91 degrees.

Yesterday’s drive represents the early stages of a 5,000 mile odyssey we have planned for the next five weeks.  (More on that soon, too.)  We are pleased and excited to see how well we are falling back into our heavy-travel routines, and remembering and relearning “how to do travel”. 
 

Map of yesterday’s drive(s)

• Seymour, Tennessee to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
• Seymour, Tennessee to Knoxville, Tennessee
• Knoxville, Tennessee to Little Rock, Arkansas

Businesses

• Cracker Barrel Restaurant and Old Country Store, Knoxville, TN
• Extended Stay America, Little Rock, AR
• Istanbul Mediterranean, Little Rock, AR
• The Old Mill Restaurant, Pigeon Forge, TN
• Woodlands Vegetarian, Nashville, TN

Geographic Locations (links from WikiTravel where available):

• Seymour, TN
• Pigeon Forge, TN
• Knoxville, TN
• Nashville, TN
• Little Rock, AR

Last Sunday (September 7), we were on the verge of signing up for a bargain-priced, charming little sublet sit out the rest of September outside Burlington, Maine, close to the Canadian border and far from just about every other reference point on earth.

And then we checked the weather report.

A year of record tropical storms and hurricanes is just no time for two barometrically-sensitive people to be on the East Coast.

We are both highly sensitive to changes in barometric pressure.  I’ve had several doctors mention they see this pattern commonly in people who have gone through a severe medical crisis, but no one has offered a more specific explanation of why we are so affected by the weather or what the specific biological method of action might be.  In erratic weather we both get migraines, I lose my blood pressure (really; Neil can hardly find my pulse and I spend a lot of time lying down with my legs elevated), my sleep patterns disrupt, I’m hard to wake up in the morning, and we are both (unsurprisingly) lethargic and a little dopey.  To top it all off, in big storms I feel like a stampeding cow, and it is all I can do not to bolt.

Thus New England at the height of storm season hasn’t been working out so well.

We re-thought the sublet, changed the plan, and decided it was time to give up on the North East, head back to Richmond to pick up our fall suitcase standing by in storage, and then high-tail it to the deserts of the South West to dry out, warm up, sit tight, and get a little paperwork and maintenance done.

We stayed in Bangor, Maine on Sunday night to rest up and work out our route back.  (While we may often change and rarely stick to plans, we like to make provisional plans anyway.)

Monday we drove South through Portland and Ogunquit, Maine, and fell in love with both.  We are looking forward to a proper tour of Maine outside of storm season, possibly early next spring, and Portland and Ogunquit will be at the top of our lists.  We also have a date for tea set with a Maine writer I really admire!

We went all the way back to Nashua, New Hampshire, to take up the offer of a free night’s stay we received from the hotel where our air conditioning broke.  We were put in a renovated room in a renovated wing…and the air conditioner didn’t work all night.  All I will say is that I appreciate the good intentions behind the offer, but I doubt even the make-your-own-waffles breakfast bar will tempt us back for a third visit.

Tuesday it was pouring rain, and while we were keen to leave Nashua we didn’t like the driving conditions, so we drove across the state line down to West Boylston, Massachusetts, where we had found a great deal on a hotel room at the Classic Inns and Suites.

We only planned to stay Tuesday night and then resume the drive to Richmond, but my sleep is such a mess and my blood pressure so low in the mornings that Neil can’t wake me up in time to check out (which we both find pretty funny) so we have now extended our stay twice.  We are hoping to check out tomorrow (weather willing).  We shall see.

(I considered titling this piece “Bloodless in Boylston” but thought it might leave the impression that we were being treated with leeches, or as Neil suggested, staging a coup.)

We haven’t been up for much sightseeing here at all, but we’ve eaten some lovely meals, and caught up a lot of rest.

We’re working on a good way to embed maps in the blog. In the meantime, you can check out our Maine-New Hampshire-Massachusetts route to see how little we’ve driven this week!

My only regrets about the North East so far are that we got so close to the Maritimes without getting Neil up to see them, and that we have some dear friends around here that I’ve just been too exhausted to visit.

All of which means we’ll just have to come back, and time our next visit much better!

Our next adventure: checking out of the hotel tomorrow.

Can we do it?  Keep your fingers crossed that the third time’s a charm.

That is not to say that the universe has changed. We are still us. You could tell which room was ours, from all the way down the hall.

It’s the only one with that number sign on it.

We are now happily installed in Chez Slim Shady. The room is nice (the single odd room sign is the only abberation we’ve found in the whole building), the staff are friendly, and Brattleboro is pretty funky.

We are staying in a Red Roof Inn with convention rooms, so the outfit is geared a little more towards business travelers than the typical low-budget, “no-tell motels” we’ve been trying to stay in.¹

We’ve already found a sharp little cafe over the river, and a range of other local restaurants that look pretty nice. The downtown square is a few blocks in either direction, and the weather is beautiful, sunny and below 80 the rest of our stay.

We’ve decided to stay a week. Stay tuned for pictures of beautiful Brattleboro!

1. “No-tell motel” is our friend Janet’s favorite phrase for our stops, and she’s terrified that we are hopping from one to another. Truth be told, we’ve only stayed in one place where Shaula has been afraid to take off her shoes. So far.

I wasn’t really sure how to ask or what to ask for. I checked in with our friend Jason, who worked in hotels for years and is the consummate hospitality professional; he gave us some great advice that I’ll be sharing in an upcoming post. (Stay tuned!)

And yet, I’m not an especially greedy or material person, and I felt a bit like a weasel for asking for a discount.

And that’s why the hotel did me a great favour in supplying some serious motivation, at the 11th hour, to ask for a discount after all…

We had had a rough night on Saturday in the heat with no windows, no air conditioning, and no room(s) at the inn(s) as an alternative. We didn’t get much rest Saturday night, we were tired and draggy all day Sunday, and my sleep was disrupted for most of the week. (That’s how I wound up too knackered to do much but watch tv.)

Neil knew that it was going to be hard to haul me out of bed in time to make an 11 am check-out deadline (I’d been waking up well after 11 am since Saturday night), so he requested a late check-out. The hotel staff kindly extended our check-out to 1 pm.

And that’s when the fun began.

Neil began my wake-up sequence around noon. This consists of elevating my feet on a pile of blankets and pillows (the chambermaids must wonder what we’re up to when they make up the rooms), and then squeezing my hands and feet until my blood pressure comes up enough that I can get moving. (I’m the only Pneumatic Wife you can take home to meet your mother!)

Adventure Timeline

• 12:30 I stumble into the shower.
• 12:35 I am completely covered in soap and shampoo. (No pics, sorry, but think of all those great baby pictures where the kid has its hair up in a big soapy coxcomb. That was me.)
• 12:36 The water stops coming out of the shower. Completely.
• 12:37 Water the colour of coffee starts pouring out of the bathtub spigot.
• 12:37:01 I yell for Neil: “Wow! Come and check this out! It’s like Amityville in here!”

And the shower never came back.

Of course.

So there I am, covered in soap, shampoo running in my eyes. (And there’s Neil, trying to be helpful and supportive while he rightfully laughs his posterior off at the situation.)

I wrap myself in a towel, venture into the frigidly air-conditioned bedroom (be careful what you wish for!), and drip my way over to the telephone to call the front desk.

Me: Hi! We’re having some trouble with the shower…

Desk Clerk: We can call someone to look at that.

Me: Um, the thing is, I am covered in soap. And shampoo. And I’m really cold.

Desk Clerk: Oh! Um…we’ll get someone there as soon as we can.

Me: Oh yeah: it doesn’t look like we’re making out 1:00 checkout. Unless you want me traipsing across the lobby in nothing but a towel and a lot of soap suds.

We sit.

We wait.

We fiddle with the taps some more. Neil manages to make the sink hiss and spit treacle, but he doesn’t have the camera ready and we don’t manage to get a picture.

We fidget.

By this point, I have goose bumps on my goose bumps, the soap is drying, my eyes are burning. Not being a girl to sit around and wait for the phone to ring, I call the desk.

There’s a knock at the door just as the desk staff answer the phone, and Neil and I have a 50′s sitcom-style split-screen conversation with the desk clerk on the phone and the house keeper at the door, saying almost the very same thing at the very same time:

Me (on phone) / Neil (at door): Hello?

Desk Clerk (on phone) / House Keeper (at door): Turns out that maintenance is doing some major work on the water system in this week. There is no water in your whole wing.

Me / Neil: Wow.

DC / HK: The water won’t be back on for hours.

Me / Neil: . . .

DC / HK: Maintenance didn’t tell the manager, so the manager didn’t know to tell the desk staff. If we had known, we wouldn’t have given you the late check out.

(my bolding added)

Me: I’m cold? And covered in soap?

DC / HK: We can take you a room in another wing to…finish…your shower.

Me (to DC, on phone): Great. Someone’s here. Thank you!

I’m a hypothermic shade of blue by this time. I consider doing a semi-streak in my soggy towel across the hotel. But, it is a small towel. I opt for changing into something less absorbent but more modest to make my trek.

While I am getting changed, I misplace the house keeper, who like Dante’s Virgil is supposed to be my guide. I go to the lobby to find her, she comes to the lobby to find me, we are happily reunited, and off to a random room with a working shower at the opposite end of the hotel we go…leaving a trail of drips in my wake.

I get in and out as fast as I can, and try my best to minimize the mess in the clean room. (I brought a towel from our room there’s no need to make extra work for the housekeeping staff.) Neil’s been busy packing up the room while I had my cross-country shower, so he starts carrying our stuff out to the car while I go to the desk to check out.

Part of Jason’s advice was to ask for a discount well before you check out, while the hotel is most motivated by the prospect of your immediate business. Unfortunately, we were right down to check out, so I blew that part of his advice. On the other hand, let’s just say I had got over my reluctance and was feeling like asking for some sort of consideration with our bill wasn’t over the top any more.

By this point, I’ve run soapy, soggy laps around the hotel, I’ve read the email with Jason’s advice several times over, and I’m fairly psyched up to have a confident, mature, calm conversation making a reasonable request about reducing our hotel bill to a senior member of staff.

And, naturally, the only person on site is a junior desk clerk. The manager has just left for the bank and won’t be back for at least half an hour. The junior clerk can’t do anything about our bill. We’re welcome to wait for the manager.

It’s just like the nursery rhyme:

For want of a nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

If we hadn’t lost the air conditioner, I wouldn’t have been sleeping late. If I wasn’t sleeping late, we wouldn’t have needed the late check out. If we didn’t have the late check-out, I wouldn’t have been caught in the broken shower. If I wasn’t caught in the broken shower, we wouldn’t have missed the manager… And all for the want of a Freidrich Climate Master!

Let me be very clear that we weren’t upset by any of this (although during the soggy periods my sense of humour may have waned a little). The hotel had a great breakfast and friendly staff, and the two problems we encountered were pretty mundane: a simple mechanical problem compounded by unusual circumstances, and a communication breakdown exacerbated by our unlucky timing. But our experiences had both affected the overall quality of our stay in Nashua and had certainly influenced our perception of the hotel.

By this point it was coming up on 2 pm, I hadn’t eaten, and waiting for the manager wasn’t a high priority. We paid the full bill, checked out, and left a request for the manager to call us, with low hopes.

We were pleasantly surprised to actually receive a call later in the afternoon. The senior desk clerk offered us a credit for a free night’s stay, without us having to go into what had happened at all. We gratefully accepted.

Since no offer of remuneration was made when we checked out, my take-away lesson is: it pays to ask!

It looks like we’ll be back in Nashua at some point in the trip to take advantage of our free night stay, ideally with the energy to do more sightseeing, and we will make sure to report back on our next round of adventures there.

Photo Credit: our shampoo model is the photogenic Miss Abbie Broom. Photo used with permission of her cool mom, my highschool classmate Zoé.

I’ve had a rough week in Nashua battling the elements, and losing. That means I’ve been too tired to write and too tired to read. I have actually been reduced to watching television.

The challenge is to find something to watch on TV that doesn’t make me feel worse!

I grew up in a TV family: my father was in sales and later management at a TV station in Western Canada. We actively discussed and dissected and deconstructed television advertisements and programs; I was explicitly raised to talk back to the television.

Finding something I can watch on TV is like trying to eat out in chain restaurants when you were raised by a chef.

It’s not about “good vs bad” TV: I have an extremely high cheese tolerance. (Keep reading!) It’s about finding TV that isn’t so violent, racist, sexist or all-around demeaning that I can bear to watch.

And that brings us to TNT the innocuous cheese network.

I can rely without hesitation on the TNT afternoon lineup of reruns of Law and Order, Charmed, and more Law and Order, to while away my most non-functional days.

The plots are engaging but not gut-wrenching; lose ends are wrapped up in a tidy package by the end of the episode; and I care just enough to follow the story without actually feeling emotionally invested in the fates of the imaginary people parading before me.

The nostalgia part comes in because this is not the first time I’ve sat in a hotel room, sick, watching TNT.

I have a literal sensation of déjà vu.

Back in 2003, Neil and I were living in Dallas, Texas, finishing up his programming contract, and gearing up for a move to Northern Virginia.

Only Neil’s contract was extended for a week: a week longer than our apartment lease.

No problem! We put our stuff in storage, and moved into an extended stay motel.

Neil’s work contract kept getting extended. A week here, a week there. For a grand total of over three months.

(We kept reprising our going away party, too, which turned into a three-month-running weekly dinner and salon at Addison’s wonderful Dream Cafe, with our brilliant political and programming friends whom I’m pleased to report all played together nicely.)

The hotel we stayed in was a Motel 6. Below a set of clog-dancing floozies. Behind the biggest strip club in Dallas.

(Neil liked to point out we could have folded dollar bills into airplanes and flown them over the wall.)

When the maids showed up to kick me out every day, I’d walk down the road to the only clothing-mandatory establishment in the vicinity: the IHOP.

Nice neighbourhood.

I’d nurse a cup of IHOP tea until it was safe to go back to the room. And then, to while I away my convalescence-impaired, low-brain function hours, I’d watch Law and Order and Charmed on TNT until Neil came home for dinner.

When we moved from Northern Virginia to Richmond in the spring of 2004, we stayed in an extended-stay hotel again for a month while we looked for a place to live. (This time we upgraded to a Candlewood Suites. They provide GREAT value for the money, and if you can afford them, I can’t recommend them enough.) I was sick, as usual, and TNT was my afternoon companion.

In the summer of 2007, we were set to move into a newly-renovated apartment as the very first tenants, only there’s a price to pay for being pioneers: the building inspector’s certificate of occupancy didn’t come through as anticipated and the apartment wasn’t ready for a month. The problem was that we had to move out of our old address anyway. So back we went to the same Candlewood Suites, and as I was still sick, the casts of Charmed and Law and Order kept me company through the day.

When you compare the cost of an apartment plus utilities with the extended-stay rates, and then throw in full cable and maid service, hotel living doesn’t come out to be all that expensive. Even before this trip, hotels have done very well by us as stop-gap accommodations.

So here I sit in Nashua, in a hotel, a bit too overtired to think straight, whiling away the afternoons with my pals the crime-fighting police and district attorneys of New York, and the demon-fighting witches of San Francisco.

And it feels like old home week.

Comfort and familiarity can come from the strangest of circumstances.

After a rough start in Nashua in Friday, we spent a lovely Saturday afternoon walking around downtown, but that’s all we’ve managed to see so far.

By Saturday night the heat was unbearable, and Friday’s unseasonably high temperatures had developed into a full-out heat wave.

Every room in our hotel was booked, because of the Can-Am League baseball game in town, and so was every other hotel in Nashua.

And around 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning we realized the air conditioner had stopped working.

No joke.

And the room felt like a cook stove.

We called the front desk, and it turned out that our wing of the building relied on a very old central air conditioning system (a Freidrich Climate Master, for you HVAC connoisseurs) which had thrown a bearing, and about a third of the rooms in the hotel were now without air conditioning. They expected it to take days to get fixed.

Let me repeat: one third of the rooms, overflowing with drunk, sun-struck, rowdy baseball fans, in a record heat wave, had no air conditioning at all. Including ours of course.

Don’t forget that every hotel in town was booked solid because of the baseball game. There was nowhere else to go nor did we feel like packing up and leaving, half-asleep, in the middle of the night. With a hotel overflowing with angry, overheated baseball fans, the idea of sleeping in the car, in the heat, didn’t seem appealing or prudent, either. And the hotel room didn’t even have exterior windows. (The windows look out, oddly, onto an interior hallway, and are sealed shut.)

We don’t get stressed about these things. Parts wear out, machines break. The air conditioning failure certainly wasn’t personal or malicious on the part of the hotel.

Unfortunately, what we do instead is get headaches and feel sick.

To put our Nashua experience in perspective, I have to tell you about when our air conditioning went out in Dallas, Texas, in a heat wave of over 110 degrees. Now that’s the kind of weather where babies and pets and old people wind up dead. In Texas, state law requires apartment managers to offer emergency maintenance services to keep air conditioners running for that very reason.

When our Dallas apartment air conditioner went out on a Friday night, the junior maintenance guy on call told us that he could fix our ratty, gasping air conditioner right away, or we could wait until Monday and get a brand new air conditioner installed.

The apartment was a dump. There was no glaze on the enamel kitchen sink and there was wallpaper on the kitchen counters. When we complained to the office that maintenance had failed to show up on several occasions, the explanation was invariably that the maintenance guy (you know, the guy with the master key to all the apartments) was away for a court appearance. Of all the strange and awful places we have lived in, and there have been many, this place was working hard to win bottom place on the list.

Living in this dump, the prospect of a brand new appliance that actually worked, and kept our apartment comfortably cool instead of just slightly less hot, was too tempting to pass up. We agreed to wait three days, in the heat wave, until Monday.

To survive, that first night we dragged our inflatable mattress across the yard, used our property key to get into the common area in the main building, and slept on the floor of the office. (We might not have class, but we’re great urban survivors.)

On Monday, the senior maintenance guy showed up (maybe his trial was in recess), told us the junior guy was nuts, and pieced together our banged-up old air conditioner which wheezed out luke-warm air for the rest of the summer.

All of which is to say that losing air conditioning in a decent hotel on a sub-100 day in New Hampshire really pales in comparison. (Although I still managed to get good and sick from the heat.)

How does our Granite Inn story end?

The hotel got some things right: the staff offered to move us to a room in a newer wing, with functioning in-room air conditioning, as soon as guests checked out and housekeeping staff could make up a room.

Before a new room came available, a local HVAC repair person came out on a Sunday (thank you anonymous HVAC superhero!) and got things fixed up. The hotel then gave us the option to keep our old room and avoid the hassle of moving, or change to a newer, recently renovated room. We were completely wiped out after a hot, sleepless night, and I was feeling pretty sick, so we opted to stay where we were.

That was Sunday, and as of Wednesday, I am still a little draggy: sick, insomniac, indigestive and exhausted from the heat.

We would certainly have been more impressed if the hotel had done anything extra: given us our sleepless Saturday night for free, extended us the weekly rate for our week-long stay even though we didn’t book a full week up-front (we extended our stay after the first night), or offered us a discount on a stay at another Best Western hotel. But to be honest, their customer service has still been a higher level than most places we’ve stayed at. And while we always appreciate exceptional customer service, we don’t feel entitled to it or expect it. (We would stay here again and overall we would recommend the hotel.)

Our current score in Nashua is: Weather 2, Shaula 0.

The other point to keep in mind is that even though I’ve been literally a little under the weather this week, the heat and humidity of New England, even in this hot and soggy record-breaking summer, is nothing like the oppressive summer weather of Richmond, Virginia.

For the 4 years we lived in Richmond, I effectively spent my summers under house arrest. If I so much as walked from the front door to the car, I could be sick for days from the heat and the air quality. Thanks to the humidity-driven high mold and fungus counts in Richmond, even sitting inside a sealed room with filtered air and industrial air conditioning, I would feel worse on the muggiest days. This started in mid-June and lasted until mid-September: I was trapped in the house for 3 months out of every year.

We moved heaven and earth to put this trip together so that we could be on the road by July 1 (2008), and get me out of Richmond before the worst heat hit. New England might be having one of its worst summers on record, and I may have had a slightly hard time this week in particular, but the weather up here is still easier to take and easier on my health than summers in Richmond have been. And that makes this trip overall, and even our sleepy week in Nashua, a big hit.

We’re not sure where we’re heading next, but we’ll definitely be chasing cooler weather. And we may not be moving too quickly.

Image Credit World Meteorological Association

Related Articles

• Knackered in Nashua (Part 1)

We took the back roads in from Sturbridge, Massachusetts on Thursday, August 14, and got in late.

How late?

Too late!

Restaurants and grocery stores around here close at 9:00 pm. We finished checking in at…9:01 pm. Naturally.

We did however manage to snag one of the last rooms at the inn (the Granite Inn, in fact) on a Thursday night, going into a weekend when EVERY hotel in town was completely booked thanks to the Nashua Pride baseball team home game at historic Holman Stadium.

I also managed, somewhat miraculously, to wake up in time to hit the make-your-own-waffle-bar continental breakfast before it closed at 9:30 a.m. the next morning. (As a non-morning person, this was really a triumph for me.) Hooray!

Here I need to praise the Granite Inn: their complimentary continental breakfast is one of the two best we’ve had the pleasure to wake up for on this trip. The Sturbridge Publick House offered coffee, (good!) tea, and baked-on-the-premises fresh pastries that were very good. The Granite Inn has coffee, tea, a selection of juices, make-your-own-waffles (with a funky rotating waffle iron), fresh bagels, fresh English muffins, and fresh butter and milk free of preservatives.

You’ll notice that I use the word “fresh” a great deal: that’s because food-grade food has been rare in our experience of continental breakfasts over the past six weeks. Most cream cheese, creamer and butter / margarine we’ve encountered doesn’t require refrigeration because it contains more preservatives than food; many of the pastries have been so sugar-filled and chemical-laden that, to use Neil’s favourite phrase, they have the shelf life of gravel. In other words, it resoundingly fails the “don’t eat anything that doesn’t rot” standard. I realize that many people eat food like this every day, but my health and my excuse for an immune system just won’t tolerate the ersatz foods that constitute the standard American diet. As a result, we generally don’t have high expectations of hotels’ advertised “complimentary breakfasts,” and it is an absolute delight to encounter something that is not only edible but delicious.

(We understand from a chat with one of the staff that the Granite Inn is under fairly new management ownership who have been making a lot of positive changes, including fixing up the breakfast. Thank you!)

After breakfast our weather adventures began in earnest.

Friday was a hot, humid day; not a bad day compared to the sticky summers we’re escaping from Richmond, Virginia, but more than unpleasant enough by local Nashua standards. We got stuck outside for an hour (it’s a long story), overdressed. By the time we got home, I collapsed in a nap.

Friday night we watched the evening news: about how the weather on the east coast is so severe that the Bronx is FLOODED.

It was vindicating that it wasn’t “just” me—crazy weather tends to knock me flat, and this summer has been breaking historic records for crazy weather. I’m glad we weren’t planning on spending the summer at the beach!

I worry for all the people in the tourism industry, especially all the mom-and-pop businesses, whose operations are being hit by both the poor weather and the high cost of gas. One of the hotel owners we’ve chatted with said that August is the month that hotels make their money for the year; it’s like Christmas shopping for retail businesses. And, outside of special events like the baseball game in Nashua and weddings in Sturbridge, every single hotel we’ve stayed at has been at least half empty for the entire trip.

We chalked my bad day up to crazy weather. Little did we know our weather adventures were just beginning.

Next: Knackered in Nashua Part 2

The cards depict the Sturbridge Publick House Historic Inn and Country Motor Lodge where we are staying right now. The Inn, founded by Colonel Ebenzer Crafts, is over 235 years old. Famous guests of the Inn include General Lafayette and his son, George Washington Lafayette, in 1824.

We are in the Country Lodge on top of the hill, shown up in the top right corner of the picture. That means we’re in a spacious motel room, decorated in an early colonial country style, with colonial print wallpaper, colonial furniture, and best of all two double beds joined by a writing desk that doubles as a bedside table with a slanted top that things roll off of at random times in the night. There’s also a bake shop, a gift shop, and two restaurants here, too. In the morning, we have a complimentary breakfast of fresh pastries, coffee and tea in Ebenezer’s Tavern downstairs (provided I wake up early enough). Neil seemed pretty happy with the the cinnamon buns yesterday. With rainy weather in the 60′s during the day and down to the low 50′s at night, we’re looking forward to trying the hot apple cider, too.

We’re also looking forward to buying some stamps so we can pop these postcards in the mail to T. and B. Hopefully today.

One state down, 47 to go!