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.