Last year my husband and I decided to use a free stay at a B&B that we had been given, and we thought it would be fun to use it for a getaway for just the two of us. We had looked at the online brochure for this place, and it looked idyllic and beautiful. In my head, I pictured us sitting on the porch of our private cabin in the morning mist, sipping coffee while looking out at the mountain meadow setting, listening to the birds, possibly seeing a deer grazing quietly in the field…you know, kind of like those old Folgers coffee commercials, cozy sweaters and all.
We made reservations and packed for our getaway, then took off for the B&B, talking about how great it would be to have our own private cabin, a coffee maker, and a nice home-cooked breakfast tomorrow. That was about as close as we got to the dream actually coming true.
We drove down what seemed like a reallllly long gravel road, and then a realllly long dirt driveway, and finally arrived at the main house. So far, so good. We could see the cabins and the surrounding pastures and hills. It looked great. The hosts had called and said that they’d be out in the pastures feeding animals or fixing fences or something, but that they’d leave us a note inside with instructions for our stay. Ok… There were a couple of kids sitting around a fire outside, toasting marshmallows. They told us to let ourselves in the main house, which we did.Right inside we found a note. Ahh, we thought, here are directions to our cabin, and there’s no one here, so it’s nice and quiet already! Sigh! Peace! The note said “Hi guys! Welcome! Please make yourselves at home (ok, good). We’ll be back shortly. Your room is down at the end of the first hall to your left , and the bathroom in the hall is yours.” (eyebrow up—the hall inSIDE the main house..??) We thought, OK…this is not what we had in mind, but whatever, I’m sure it’s fine; so we walked down the long tiled hallway, past a laundry room and a bathroom, to the end, where we found: Our Room.
The room was solid wood. Wood walls, wood floor, wood ceiling--decorated like a granny’s bedroom, with just a rocking chair, bed, antique tiny dresser with a mirror, and that’s..IT. (No wait, there was also a window). No closet and thus, nowhere to hang clothes. No…TV. ? Not even a radio. There was a large box fan on the floor, which we wondered at…but ok. We set our bags down (because, that’s all you could do with them), and sat on the bed (which immediately said “squeeeeeeeaaaaaaakkkkkkk”)
Assuming people who come here congregate in the ‘communal’ living room if they want to watch TV or something, we figured, OK, let’s check out the bathroom. Out in the hall.
We stepped into the hallway bathroom, which at first seemed very large and nice—hey look, a giant round jetted tub (score!) AND a double-headed shower (yay!). We thought, why not enjoy the jetted tub, so we got that started and got in. It wasn’t *quite* big enough for us both, so he had to sit with the faucet sort of jabbing him in the back, but we settled in. Unfortunately we had added some bubbles to the jetted tub, which were now multiplying at an alarming rate. Bubbles were growing around us and over us. Pretty soon we couldn’t see each other or ourselves, so we turned off the bubble machine--I mean—jets. Now we’re covered in soap suds. So we’re like, “Hey, ok, we’ll hop across into the 2-man shower (and it was huge), and rinse this stuff off.
We stood up to get out and realized there were two towels for us, but nothing on the highly polished , super-slick tile floor to keep us from falling and killing ourselves while getting out, covered in bubbles. We laid the hand towel on the floor between the tub and shower and gingerly stepped out and across to the shower to rinse off the soap. This was still OK at this point.
I turned on the shower head on one side, and we’re like, yeah, this will work. Since there’s two heads, (how cool is that?) he turned around and turned on the other shower head. Which immediately sucked all the hot water from the shower on my side (and possibly the whole house) into THAT head, leaving me under a stream of freezing cold water. “AAAAieee!! Eek! Yikes! Shut it OFF, SHUT IT OFF, SHUTITOFFFFFF!!”
We managed to get rinsed off, shared a towel getting out, and stepped back out onto the single hand towel ‘island’ in the middle of the shiny slippery-as-heck tile floor, and tip-toed back to the bedroom to sit on the bed (“squeeeeeaaaaakkk”). On the way out of the bathroom, I also noticed that if we were thirsty that night, we appeared to be limited to the tiniest Dixie cups imaginable, next to the sink. Ok…
We decided, well, we may as well try and get some rest, so we got in the bed. Which appeared to have been short-sheeted by the Housekeeper from Hell, so we spent the night yanking and tugging to get the blankets and sheets up to our chins. The pillows also appeared to have been constructed by taking three feather pillows and combining them inside one pillowcase, so they were HUGE and caused us to have our necks bent at almost a 90-degree angle when lying down.
Once settled, I noticed, “Boy, it sure seems warm in here”. It was summer, so it was very warm out. The room (or the house) appeared to have no heating or cooling system that we could discover. Then we remembered the box fan under the window. “Turn that on,” he said, “that will help!” I opened the window and turned on the fan to ‘low’. It sounded like a 747 was coming through the bedroom. We started laughing…but at least there was a breeze. We left it on as long as we could stand, but we eventually felt it could be a fire hazard at the rpm it was approaching, so we turned it off and tried to relax, still yanking at the bedding.
At some point, we realized we were thirsty, but we also realized there was no nightlight in the hallway OR the bathroom, so we had to either turn on all the lights or creep through the dark on the tile to get to the Dixie cups in the bathroom for our 2-ounce-at-a-time shots of water. Ahhh, that’s refreshing!
Then the family appeared to have returned home, with their kids. Or a large basketball team. It was hard to tell from the AMOUNT OF NOISE COMING FROM DIRECTLY OVER OUR BEDROOM. It sounded like they were getting about a dozen 9-year-olds ready for bed. Lots of yelling and banging around. I thought they were possibly have a tumbling meet and/or a full-court basketball game upstairs. We waited for what seemed like FOREVER, sort of staring at the ceiling in amazement, until they finally settled down.
So, house quiet (still hot), window open, fan off, necks at 90 degree angles, we tried to sleep. We must have dozed off, because at about dawn I realized the temp outside had dropped, and now we were freezing to death under the short-sheeted bed covers. What actually woke us UP, though, was the wolves. Yes, wolves. Howling. Outside. Not coyotes. I’ve lived here a long time, and I know coyote sounds. These were definitely not coyotes. What the--?? So we shut the window and tried to survive til morning. Ahhh , morning. Breakfast sounds were going on, and we got up and dressed, put on our coats (yes, it was probably 50 degrees INSIDE) and went down the hall into the main area, where three couples were already sitting at the dining room table (only one table, and it’s full, sorry) lingering over the end of their breakfast. The hosts greeted us (though looked a little strangely at our wearing coats) and offered coffee and said the table would be free anytime now, and then they’d be happy to serve us breakfast. We nodded and dumbly held out cups for coffee, went to the smallish couch and sat down to read a magazine and wait. We waited and read. And waited and read. Refilled the coffee. Finished the magazines, cover to cover.
The couples from Seattle made no attempt to finish and leave but sat loudly discussing all their traveling (can you name drop any MORE?? We don’t CARE where you’ve been, we just want to eat and LEAVE!) Then they started in on how cool their homeschooling was going.
Next they moved on to the issue of Silverwood theme park and how the safety on the rides was in question, and how could the park discriminate like that, by making people move around on a ride, based on weight. Isn’t that discriminatory? Someone should really make a complaint...It’s really nothing like the park at Blah Blah Blah and our trip to Blah Blah Blah, and on and on. And on. It was too cold to even sit on the porch with our coffee, so we were trapped there, listening to them.
Occasionally one of the hosts would say “Can we get you anything while you wait?” and we’d say loudly, “No, three cups of coffee is good. (glancing at table and then at the clock) We’ll just WAIT.” Pointedly. The super-cool folks finally decided that they’d loudly talked about everysingletraveldestination that no one else in the room had probably been to, so they put on their LL Bean jackets and left. *sigh*!
We got up and moved to the table. The host said finally, “All-righty folks, now..what sounds good for breakfast?” I’m thinking “Yeah!! Breakfast!” so I said, “Oh, I’d love an omelet and some bacon.” He said “I don’t make omelets.” ??? Excuse me—what?? So I said “What DO you make?” He said he made really great scrambled eggs, and I was pretty sure that scrambled was ALL they offered at that point, so I said, sure the scrambled eggs would be great. After the amount of time it takes to chase a chicken down, teach it to lay eggs, and then fly to France and learn how to make cheese for the eggs, he finally emerged from the kitchen with my eggs. Not, however, two plates. Just mine, in a bowl. My husband looked at them and said, “Wow, that looks really good…” The host looked at him and said (I swear I’m not making this up) “Oh, did YOU want some too?” Seriously???? Long pause while he made another bowl and we ate what was left of the fresh fruit from the cool Seattle folks.
We sat there in our coats and ate our eggs, while the host and his wife kept hovering around trying to make small talk with us. Finally I just said, “I’m really not much of a morning person; I just like to sit and stare in the morning.” So the wife disappeared, and we didn’t see her again. We managed to smile and thank them for the stay and their hospitality, but we know now that we are definitely not the B&B *type*. :P We actually laughed about it a lot on the way home, because it seemed too crazy to be true. --Stef
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