Being a Big Girl

Woo-hoo! I am happy to actually have a few moments for the Squeaky Voice. Things have been so busy lately and it’s been really hard to get to some of my favorite things. However, the summer has been and should always be, about doing things that you love. Right now, I am happy to report, I am doing several such things. Currently, I am sitting on the ferry waiting to set sail to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. Love that! I’m surrounded by three of my favorite people. Love that! The sun is glistening on the water. Love that, too! We are heading out for a five day camping vacation and have some friends joining us tomorrow. So much to love and enjoy and having time to blog is the icing on the cake.

I took a little break there, we are now on the great San Juan Island. Yippee. We’ve had a laid back day just hanging out. Right now Max is climbing trees, Madison is reading a book, I’m writing and Mike is getting the grill set for dinner. Our friends are in route and I think there are s’mores in our near future. It doesn’t get better than this.

I do love camping and family time, but I also love alone time. It’s funny because when I was younger I hated to be by myself. But as I’ve grown older I have come to value “me time.” Earlier this week, I was teaching a class in Bothell which is about an hour and a half away. Because I was teaching two days in a row I decided to stay overnight in a hotel. The hotel is just across the street from the school where I was working. I had never stayed in a hotel by myself before and I was pretty excited to give it a go. It just seemed like such a grown-up thing to do-Going on a business trip, as I came to see it. I looked the hotel up on the internet and it had an outdoor pool. I can’t remember the last time I just went and sat around a pool for hours. I decided that after my class I would treat myself to pool time. Even if some of pool time was spent going over my plans for the next day.

I didn’t book my hotel on the internet website, because they gave a discount to teachers at MEIPN where I was teaching. So I got up got my phone, looked the phone number up, called and made my reservations. Would they give me the discount? Well, sure, they hesitated, why not. After my class, I headed over to the Country Inn, which despite its name and outward appearance, was very modern indoors. It’s funny because I’d never heard of the Country Inn before this, I had only heard of the Comfort Inn another chain. The inside was really beautiful lots of windows and I knew, as I stood at the check-in counter, that just a few minutes separated me from the outdoor pool. Thank goodness because it was an amazingly beautiful day and we don’t always get those, even in the summer. I could picture myself by the pool, laptop on the table next to a fuzzy, yummy grown up drink. I would look like a magazine ad for a sophisticated urban woman. A real live grown-up.

The girl at the counter was young and friendly. She was very gentle with me when she broke it to me that I did not have reservations for the night. “Oh no! Did I accidentally book for tomorrow night?” No not the next night either. At this point most people would think it was the hotel’s mistake, but that never crossed my mind. Something had been nagging me since the moment I pulled into the parking lot. It was the name –The Country Inn. I leaned over the counter and, in a whisper, asked “Is there aaaa Comfort Inn around?” She told me there was one about three miles away. One exit north. She offered to call them for me and assured me that this happened all the time. She offered to save me some embarrassment by not telling them she was calling from the main desk at the Country Inn.

“Hi this is Aimee Allen and I was just calling to confirm my reservation,” she began. I held my breath half-hoping for the reservation and half-hoping they would just take me in at the Country Inn. She hung up the phone, nodded, printed out some directions and off I went to the Comfort Inn.

Even on my way to the Comfort Inn (which I couldn’t find for thirty minutes)I tried to convince myself that maybe the website I was originally on, was the Comfort Inn and maybe that great outdoor pool would be waiting for me, if of course I could ever found the place. After several U-turns and a few words not worth repeating here, I pulled into the Comfort Inn and knew immediately that these accommodations that shared a parking lot with The Holiday Inn Express, QFC and Papa Murphy’s was not where I was hoping.I guess I initially was on the Country Inn site, but in the time it took to get the phone in hand, I had switched Country Inn to Comfort Inn in my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, the Comfort Inn was fine. I have certainly stayed in worse, and remember I am the girl who is choosing to sleep in a nylon tent for the next four nights. The Comfort Inn was clean. Everyone was friendly. The woman at the front desk assured me that my room was “Very nice” the continental breakfast was “Very delicious” and the location was “very convenient”. I already agreed with her on the convenient part seeing as the “hotel” was at the back of a grocery store parking lot, of course it would be more convenient if the hotel was across the street from the school, like the Country Inn. There was a pool, but it was indoors, which defeated my purpose. And the rooms were fine, but there wasn’t a balcony or deck to sit on. My visions of sophisticated big-girl time were beginning to unravel.

I was hungry, I was lonely, and I sure didn’t have pool time and a fuzzy drink in my future. I headed out to get something to eat, bypassed the QFC, got into my car and found a hole in the wall pizza place. While waiting for the pizza I witnessed a very heated argument between a teenager and his father. The kind that makes you very slowly and very steadily get out of their line of vision, while still watching to make sure they don’t hurt each other. I hurriedly took my pizza and vanilla shake back to my hotel room where I proceeded to watch three back to back episodes of Law & Order.

Come to think of it, three episodes of Law & Order, more slices of pizza than I will ever admit, and a large vanilla shake might just qualify as grown-up time after all. And on that note I have been invited to climb a Madrona tree with Max. Sometimes being a big girl isn’t all it’s cut out to be anyway.