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The Toskey Reports: The Great Smokey Mountains: Day 2, Part 1: the Thing about Cheap Hotel Rooms
Mom thought it was funny when she discovered I’d been in the car all night. Yeah, mom. You’re quite the joker. They trust you with kids, and you can’t even take care of a teddy bear? Sheesh! The two of us went to find the breakfast room at our hotel. The weird thing was that the breakfast room was the door right next to Mom and Dad’s on the second floor! Except, you weren’t allowed to go through that door. Instead, you had to go down the stairs, around the building and up the “wheelchair ramp”. It was an adequate ramp, if your wheelchair was the width of a child stroller and it would fit through narrow doorways.
I reminded Mom there were a lot of other hotels in Pigeon Forge. Hotels with elevators and large breakfast areas on the main floor. She reminded me most were $100 to $250 a night. Our total bill for two nights at this hotel was $100.
Our hotel was on a plot of land cut from the side of a mountain. I couldn’t help wondering how often they had rock slides there.
“Our room is on the opposite side of the building.” Mom pointed out.
Having given the breakfast room a cursory look, we went back to the hotel room. Dad had just gotten out of the shower, so we all went back together to have breakfast. The morning offering was pretty typical: bread you could toast yourself, packs of Quaker oatmeal, scrambled eggs, individual containers of Dannon yogurt, and biscuits and gravy and cold dry cereal. Here’s the thing with hotel cereal: they buy it in bulk and pour it into a dispenser. These two dispensers had sticker labels proclaiming them to contain Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Cheerios – the latter being gluten free. Those labels came already glued to the dispensers. There’s no guarantee what’s in those dispensers is actually the brand name product or a cheaper knock off cereal. And unless you can see the label from knock off brand, you have no idea what ingredients are in them.So Mom stuck to oatmeal, yogurt and eggs.
“Other hotels have more gluten free varieties.” I reminded Mom.
“I’m just fine with what I have.”
Back in the room, in the light of day, Mom and Dad noticed an area of the wall between the sleeping area and the bathroom. There was a notable chunk that had been cut out and sloppily re-patched.
“Access to water pipes.” Dad assumed.
The re-patch wasn’t the real issue though. It was the smudge marks all over the wall. Even Mom had to cringe at that.
Mom and Dad looked at each other, looked at the wall, then back at each other.
“We’re here for two nights, fifty buck a night.” Mom reminded him. “The beds are comfortable, the showers were hot, and the breakfast was free. What are the odds of finding all that somewhere else? We can live with the smudge marks.”
Dad, always one to pinch the penny, agreed with her.
The Toskey Reports: The Great Smokey Mountains: Day 1, Part 3: Road Trip with the Prince Warriors and the Thrifty Parents
Traveling with grown ups is the worst. These people never stopped for anything! Well, yeah, they did stop, but it was for gas or bathroom breaks, never for the important things. Even as a teddy bear, strapped into the backseat where the view is mainly black upholstery, you notice those kinds of things.
“I’m hungry!” I complained. It was nearly 2 o’clock in the afternoon. We’d been driving since 10, and I was ready to get out for a while.
“Honey, we really should stop.” Mom suggested to Dad.
He nodded. “Ok. There’s an exit coming up.”
My heart went pitter pat! Finally! I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the road sign, expecting to see restaurant insignia to showing the different possibilities. Instead, there were only two words: Rest Stop.
What?
The Equinox came to a stop. Mom jumped out and headed for the building and Dad pulled out the cooler.
WHAT?
He got out a loaf of gluten free bread, a regular loaf of wheat, a package of lunch meat and another of sliced cheese. This was joined by a bunch of bananas and some granola bars.
WHAT!?!?!?
That was our lunch, and it was eaten on the road, in a moving vehicle. Dinner that night had the very same quality to it.
Man, these people are nuts!
Meanwhile, Mom was playing a book-on-tape from her phone. It was nice that the ‘Nox had a place you could plug in your phone and play audio from it. Of course, it took Mom five minutes to figure out how to do it, and every time we stopped it was another five minutes getting it to play right again.
I had expected Mom to pick out a stupid romance novel from the library’s app, but instead she’d gotten a sci-fi novel, the second in the series. The family had listened to the first book on their trip to Washington DC that summer (which they had left me out of. Sheesh!), and now Dad wanted to hear the second one.
“Hey!” I protested. “I didn’t get to read the first one! I won’t know what’s going on!”
No one cared. They were going to listen to it anyway. Bears get no say in what they have to listen to.
It turns out, the story was cool. The book was The Prince Warriors: The Unseen Invasion. https://theprincewarriors.com/books/ It’s a lot like the Narnia books: these kids are transported to a different world (Ahoratos) that is cared for by a mysterious creature named Ruwach. In the series, the children are sent on missions to collect pieces of armor which protects them from the enemy. In the first story, the children were given a breastplate
which shines to help guide them and shoes that have properties to get over hurdles and traps. In The Unseen Invasion, they are given seed that are to be their shields (I won’t spoil it by telling you how it works, but it’s really cool!) Two of the kids bring objects back from Ahoratos (a real no-no) and that transgression allows the enemy to open a portal between Ahoratos and the real world. Only Prince Warriors can see the enemy approaching, and it’s up to them to close the portal and make things right again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPVvlkjZ-HU
The book is over seven hours long, so it lasted for most of the trip. By the time it finished it was dark and raining, and we still had a long way to go. Mom knows she sees better at night than Dad so she took over driving. Even so, she seemed to spend as much time glancing at the navigator as she did the road. She had it zoomed in to a couple hundred feet, so it was showing the turns better than she could see it through the windshield.
It was nearly 10 pm when we got to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. I watched out the window, mesmerized, as we drove though town. It was all lit up and glitzy, like Las Vegas! I saw a building built upside down, and another built laying on it’s side! King Kong was climbing up a miniature skyscaper, and a bus gusted up like an old time trolley was shuttling down the main drag. There were stores that had the entry ways shaped like giant sharks and bears, and one where the doorway was in the lens of a ginormous camera! Wow! Was I gonna have fun in this town!
We finally got to the hotel. Mom and Dad trudged back and forth between the ‘Nox and their room on the second floor, hauling up their suitcases, the cooler and backpacks.
Then they locked up the car with me still in it.
Hello? Hey! I’m still here.
But they didn’t come back, and they didn’t even leave the keys so I could listen to the radio.
Sheesh! The nerve of some humans! I was left to stare at the back of the passenger seat all night.
Sigh.
Such is the life of a Traveling, Forgotten, Bear.
The Toskey Reports: The Great Smokey Mountains: Day 1, Part 2: Slow Food and Near Misses
It seemed to take forever for dad to get packed up for our trip, but finally we were on our way.
Kinda.
No one had eaten breakfast so Dad decided to stop at Macdonald’s. Mom scowled at him. She’s gluten intolerant. That means she can’t eat anything with flour in it. It messes up her stomach. Sometimes it’d give her really stinky farts. Sometimes it’d make her live in the bathroom for a while. Before she knew what she had, it made her so sick she was in the hospital for ten days in something called the ICU. Dad said she nearly died.
So, no. MacDonalds was not a good place for her to eat. Too many hamburger buns and breaded food.
“Just get me a large iced tea.” She said. “We’ll stop at the grocery store for some gluten free bagels. But, while you’re in McDonalds, I’ll figure out the navigator.
Dad had a new used car with a built-in navigator. No one knew how to use it except Joe, but Joe wasn’t with us. While dad was in the restaurant, mom pulled the users guide out of the glove box and started pushing buttons.
She said a few words she wasn’t supposed to.
“You said a bad word.” I pointed out.
“Are you wanting to ride in the back with the luggage?”
That was kind of funny! We were in a Chevy Equinox. It’s a hatch back, so the back where the luggage was, was just behind me in the passenger compartment. I would still be able to hear everything they said and see out the window.
I decided I preferred being in the seat though, so I kept my mouth shut.
Mom kept pushing buttons, but now, when ever she started to say a bad word, she would look over her shoulder and scowl at me.
As if it was my fault she couldn’t figure out the stupid computer!
It took about five minutes of pushing buttons for mom to get the address of the hotel entered.
Dad still hadn’t come out of the restaurant.
“I remember when fast food was fast.” Mom told me.
Dad finally returned, grumbling about incompetent teenagers and lousy service.
“Remember when fast food used to be fast?” He asked us.
The next stop was Meijer. Man, it’s amazing how busy that store was on a rainy Sunday morning!
Dad dropped Mom off at the entrance and started circling the parking lot, looking for a spot.
“I feel like a vulture looking for a carcass.” He grumbled.
“Is carcass another name for parking spot?” I asked him.
“It is in Michigan.”
We finally found our carcass just as Dad’s phone buzzed. Mom had found some gluten free bagels and muffins and was ready for us to meet her at the entrance.
“What’d you get for me?” I asked after she’d buckled in.
They ignored me.
I quickly forgot about not getting breakfast when the navigator kicked in.
“Bear left.” It informed us.
There was a bear to the left of us? I swung my head around to see. No bear.
“Bear right.”
I looked to the right this time. Still no bear! I was getting a bit angry. I wanted to see some bears!
“Police bear left.” the navigator said.
“A POLICE BEAR?!??! Where? Where?” I wanted to know.
“It didn’t say police.” Mom sighed. “It said please.”
“But where’s the bear?”
“There’s no bears. It just means to turn that direction.”
I was getting huffy now. “Well, if it wanted us to turn, why didn’t it just say
to turn?”
“Maybe it’s wanting to expand your vocabulary.”
I didn’t want my vocabulary expanded. I wanted to see some bears!
We’d gotten on the interstate and were just starting to get out of town when Dad noticed something.
“Take a look at that guy’s tire! It’s flat!”
The guy two cars ahead of us and one lane over was driving at highway speed with a very low rear tire.
“Can you get up beside him so we can warn him?” Mom wondered.
Dad tried, but we were in the slow lane. He switched over to
the inside lane, but we had lost sight of the vehicle.
It was only a few minutes later, traffic came to an abrupt slow down. Everyone
was hitting the breaks!
A pick-up truck zoomed past us on the left side in the shoulder! He was pulling a trailer and couldn’t get slowed down in time. To avoid hitting us, he’d driven onto the strip of asphalt between the fast lane and the safety fence dividing the north and south lanes of traffic. We slowed way down so he could get back onto the road ahead of us.
The car with the low tire made its way over to the outside and pull to the shoulder. As we passed, we saw the tire was totally shredded.
The pick-up that had zoomed past us also made its way to the outside and stopped. He must have picked up a nail or piece of metal.
Mom and Dad looked at each other. We were barely out of town and had been witnesses to two near-accidents. Traffic was heavy, but no one had been hurt.
“Thank you, Jesus, for watching over us.” Dad breathed.
Mom and I ‘amen’ed that.
“Only nine and a half hours to go,” he added.
WHAT?!?!?!
The Toskey Reports: The Great Smokey Mountains: Day 1, Part 1: We’re Goin’ on a Road Trip!
Hello. Toskey here, the traveling bear. It’s been a while since I sent any notices, and back then it was through emails. Talk about snail mail! So, anyway, I overheard mom and dad saying they were gonna be taking a little vacation. No kids this time, just them, well, that didn’t seem right. Yeah, their youngest is now 18, has a job and a drivers license, but still, taking a vacation on their own!?!?! That just ain’t right. So yesterday morning, while mom was yelling at dad to hurry up and get his stuff packed, I snuck into their car and buckled myself in.
Mom wasn’t too happy when she opened the door to put her backpack in the back seat and saw me sitting there.
“What do you think you’re doing?” She wanted to know.
Well, duh! Like she couldn’t figure that out for herself.
“I’m coming with you.”
Mom rolled her eyes and sighed real loud.
“Honey, Toskey wants to come with us!”
“Cool!” Joe said. He was the 18 year old. He’d been my champion during our trip to the Grand Canyon seven summers earlier. He was the one who made sure I got in most of the pictures. I loved that dude! But, man! He was a lot cuter at 10 than 18. He wanted me to see the world. If he couldn’t go, he figured me going for him was the next best thing.
Dad came out into the garage and stared at me. Then he stared at mom as if this was all her idea. He rolled his eyes and sighed real loud.
“Fine.” He grumbled.
Yay! I was going! Off on adventure! Off to see the world! I was a traveling bear once more!
“Where we going?” I asked.