We arrived at the Bed and Breakfast. It was an old Victorian house. It was dusty and creaky and crumbling. A review of it on Expedia would read like this:
“Crap.”
There was no one inside. Just a big statue of an elephant. Not sure what that had to do with a Bed and Breakfast in the wine country, a place not renowned for its elephants, but I had bigger problems.
Like why had I paid $300 to be in the house from Psycho.
Staci looked over at me.
“What should we do?” she said.
“Steal the elephant and go home,” I said.
She noticed a bell on the dining room table.
“Ring the bell,” she said.
“No way,” I said.
“Ring the bell,” she said.
I rang the bell.
The proprietor greeted us. Which is an elegant way of saying that a fat guy in a t-shirt got up from his recliner in the living room and said hi.
He looked surprised. Surprised he had a guest.
I was surprised also. Surprised he didn’t look more like Norman Bates.
“Follow me,” he said, “I’ll show you to your room.”
We walked outside. It was 102 degrees.
We arrived at the room. We went inside. It was 102 degrees.
“How do we turn on the AC?” I asked.
“The what?” he said.
“Air-conditioning,” I said.
“Oh, we don’t have air-conditioning,” he said.
I think he went on to say we could open the double doors on either side of the room and get a pretty good breeze, but I’m not sure, because it was hard to hear him over all my sobbing.
All I knew at that point was that we had two six-packs of Sierra Nevada. If I kept it all to myself and didn’t let Staci have any, I could drink all 12 bottles in quick succession and hope to pass out.
I looked for some place to chill the beer.
“Do you have a little refrigerator” I asked the man.
“Yeah,” he said, pointing over to it. “It works pretty good.”
I opened the door of the refrigerator. I put my hand inside.
It was 102 degrees.
His “pretty good” meant it was a good refrigerator to melt cheese over nachos.
“Maybe the cold’s not turned up,” he said.
He tried to turn a knob inside the refrigerator.
“Wait. It is turned up.” He closed the refrigerator door. It wouldn’t stay closed. He paused.
“Let me show you where the bathroom is.”
We walked down the hall. He showed us the bathroom. Yellow shag carpeting. Cobwebs on the window. A sulphuric smell.
“Do you have any questions?” he said.
“What’s your cancellation policy?” I replied.
Staci glared at me. It’s a face I see a lot.
“He’s just kidding,” she said. “You mind showing us the pool?”
The pool was the only thing that looked decent in the brochure. In real life, there was a bottle floating in it. Along with a layer of leaves.
“I don’t remember the bottle from the brochure,” I said.
The fat man said nothing. He just picked up the bottle. He left the leaves.
In the brochure, there was a rock waterfall pouring water into the pool. I saw that the rock formation was there, but there wasn’t any water coming out of it.
“Isn’t that a waterfall in the brochure?” I said, pointing at it.
“Yeah,” he said. “You want it on?”
“Yeah,” I said, now realizing that I’d have to ask for each amenity one by one.
He turned it on.
That’s when I saw that this little Bed and Breakfast had 300 additional guests I didn’t know about.
All wasps.
And all even angrier than me.
Some vacations just get better and better.
Stay tuned for more joyous adventures from my romantic weekend.