It takes about 15 minutes, they said, to get your car out of the valet garage. So you call down and ask for yours and then the clock is ticking in your head. Now, we’re only on the second floor of this hotel, and it doesn’t seem especially busy, but I still have a slow-moving person on crutches and I’m carrying two people’s worth of luggage.
It’s a good thing, then, that our room was close to the elevator and the elevator itself opened into the lobby and directly across from the front door. Hauled all the stuff down the hall, banging walls and pinching fingers as we slowly went. Dropped our room keys off at the desk just as my car pulled up. Perfect timing.
I lost the valet ticket for a full day, and looked everywhere for the thing, twice. I’d resigned myself to having to say I lost it, knowing this sort of thing has surely happened before. I was planning to go with the classic “Shucks, what can you do?” routine when I had to call and confess I’d lost the ticket. Finally, though, I found it on top of the blankets on the bed. On the ticket it said you’d have to present a photo ID and the car’s registration.
Fine, can you bring the car up so I can root around in the glove compartment for my registration?
That’s not a problem. I keep a tidy glove compartment. I need to wash the car and thin out some of the things in the trunk, but the interior storage areas are well maintained. It’s a point of pride, and necessity. You need to know where everything is.
We, by the way, made it back to the house. It’s a six-hour drive. We stopped every hour or so to walk around for a few minutes. It makes, somehow, for a full day. But the weather was grand, the interstates in northern Ohio are of good quality, and once you were out of the cities the views along the way are nice enough.
The map routed us through Cincinnati. There’s a Mellow Mushroom there, so we picked up dinner for the next few nights. Pretzels and spring dough slices! The consensus best pizza in this, a college town, is reminiscent of Pizza Hut in their glory days, and so we sadly have to wait for good pizza when we travel, which, of course, doesn’t happen much these days.
Anyway, got to the house, unloaded the car and dumped all the clothes in the laundry. Walked around putting things away, basically counting the steps until I could pronounce the trip completed. The Yankee is sitting comfortably, after spending all of that time in the back seat of the car. Tomorrow it is back to work. Tonight, I’m hoping for more sleep than I got last night.
I wound up driving more today than I slept last night. Can’t imagine why I’m so tired this evening. My own pillows await!
