Vacation Bust-O-Rama

This is the week of my vacation. The first real vacation John and I have taken in forever. I mean, I’ve had the odd long weekend or two, and I generally take the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, but this time, we were going out of town. On a real vacation. Except it didn’t quite work out that way.

Our original plan was to go to the Outer Banks for a week, but then I wanted to do the Race for the Cure on Saturday, and John needed to be back here on Thursday, and so it didn’t seem quite worth it to drive all the way there and pay for a place for a whole week when we would only be there four days. So we decided to go to Rehoboth and stay in a hotel. It’s so much closer than North Carolina. And a hotel gave us more flexibility than a house. It seemed like such a good plan.

Our little vacation got off to a great start. We made such good time getting to the beach that we arrived two hours before our room was supposed to be ready. So we hit the main drag of Rehoboth, ordered ourselves a delicious Grotto pizza, and took a quick spin on the beach. Then we went to check into the hotel. And that’s where everything went wrong. I wanted to start crying as soon as we walked into the room, but I was determined to make this a fun vacation. I lectured myself very sternly about being a good sport and how all that really mattered was that John and Seamus and I were together and we could have fun no matter what. But the room was tiny. It was so small it didn’t even have a closet, and the bathroom was so claustrophobic that I felt trapped when I went in it. Maybe people on other floors had a lovely view, but we were on the ground floor, so our view was of the street. A view we got to enjoy from a patio with two rusty chairs and an equally rusty railing that had the bonus of being dented as well. It was nothing like the photos they had on their website. I don’t want to shock you, but it turns out that sometimes things that look good on the Internet turn out to not be so hot in reality.

We dropped off our stuff and decided to go out for another walk so we could check out our surroundings and look for fun things to do. So we walked around, and Seamus excitedly tracked scents all over town. And then we had to go back to that dismal room. I think we’d been in there for about 15 minutes before John said “Hey, how would you feel if we left a day or two early. Do you think they’d give us any money back?” He hated it as much as I did. Possibly more. So I asked. They said they’d refund the money, and we said we’d only be staying one night. And what a crappy night it was. That room had the power to make everything suck including the food we ate and the TV shows we watched. We even tried going to sleep early, but the beds were uncomfortable. We kept hearing people in the parking lot on one side and the traffic going by on the street on the other side (seriously, I think every truck and construction vehicle in the state of Delaware – or as John has taken to calling it, Hellaware – drove past that room starting at 5 am). Seamus was thoroughly freaked out and thought he had to fulfill his watch dog duties and bark a lot, and he is not a barker. This morning we packed up and hit the road, yelling “so long, stinktown!” as the car squealed out of the parking lot. And now we're home. Home sweet home.