Thursday, June 21, 2007

Terror attack averted in Reno.

There are 2 reasons why you should take me seriously when I review a place to stay. First, I'm hyper-pathogen-conscious (HPC) and second, I travel a lot. I probably spend over 1 month of the year in a hotel somewhere in the United States. I have also visited hotels and other living quarters in South America. In addition, I camp. So I think that makes me, at the very LEAST, qualified enough to tell you where you should and should not stay. Now before I go into the review of the Aikens Lodge, I want to tell you about a hotel I stayed in when traveling through Reno two summers ago.

My lovely sister, her hubby, my adorable wife, our 2 little ones and I made a hasty trip to Reno a while ago (see my first post for an explanation of time-aware deficiency (TAD) ). See, my Auntie had been out feeding her sheep and goats (she was like 85 or something at the time. A tough little lady) and ripped her back up lifting some feed sacks or something like that. She might have been birthing 100 sheep for all I know. She took me hiking once a while ago up the canyon behind their ranch. I was about 25 at the time and had a hard time keeping up with her. Of course I didn't let her know that . . . ( maybe there was some kind of energy drink with some ground-up bone marrow or some kind of Asian herbal blend . . .)

So Wendy and I needed to go see Auntie before she hiked off into that big canyon in the sky. Wendy had made this trip before and knew precisely which hotel to stay at. Reasonably priced and clean. That's a Major Contributing Factor (MCF) when deciding on where to stay. Reasonably priced AND clean. Under some circumstances they may be treated as individual factors when writing a review, but for hotels, they constitute a single MCF. Incidentally, it was at a rest stop somewhere in Middle Nevada that I discovered that HPC may be a genetically inherited mutation as I saw Wendy produce from her knapsack (She called it a "purse") a mini supply of Toilet Seat Gaskets (TSG's). "Sweet" I whisper thoughtfully.

You'd think that after discovering the Shared Genetic Mutation (SGM) between Wendy and me, that I would have deferred to her HPC guided choice of temporary lodging and booked a room at the same place. I was, however, suffering the effects of Budgetary Incontinence (BI). One of the distasteful symptoms of BI is: whereas the MCF "reasonably priced and clean" normally gets treated as one factor, it instead gets treated as two factors by some kind of "double vision" or other and the MCF "clean" gets trumped by the MCF "Reasonably priced". Therefore, we stayed at TraveLodge instead.

I should probably note at this point that the treatment for this symptom of BI is a can of Lysol. See, you hose down every surface in the hotel room with it. Otherwise you suffer from Microbial Insomnia (MI). MI is manifested by the knowledge that every orifice on your body is becoming the TraveLodge of GermWorld.

So we check into GermWorld and I hike all 500 of our suitcases, carry-ons and personal bags up 3 flights of stairs. ( is there some kind of energy drink . . . )

"Hey, not bad" I quip. With the exception of the poorly patched hole above the shower, I wasn't overly freaked out. So first things first, and I whip out the economy size can of "Fresh Linen" Lysol and begin the sweep of every surface, horizontal or not, touchable or not, in the entire room.

So this is all happening about 3 years after 9/11, and having taken some advances university level geography classes I know that things such as terror attacks, avian flu pandemics, Major League Baseball, symphonies, and good Chinese food, will be most likely to occur in cities with high populations . . . like Reno. So following the usual bedtime routine of hand washings and teeth scrubbings we all drift off to Neverland. Before long its 2:30 am. The babies and Momma are resting peacefully while my nasal cavities are thoroughly ripping the night air to shreds. Now, have you ever been deeply immersed in dreamland when suddenly all around you there are some unannounced, unexpected, unnatural goings on? Like when you're still 3 sheets to the wind and your clock radio goes off, and while a moment before you were swimming a school bus full of clouds into a mustard sandwich, slowly in a matter of 10 seconds or so, you're standing just off-stage fishing into Richie Sambora's Guitar case. Then like a fog dissipating, suddenly there's no fishing pole, no stage, and no guitar case and you are slapping at the clock hoping to coincidentally hit the snooze button. Well I gradually became aware that the air horn on my fork was blasting like a Kenworth every time I pulled the velcro straps off. Then suddenly there wasn't any velcro, or a fork, or a Kenworth. There was only this incoherent yelling, seemingly coming from the bathroom, in Arabic. "What the . . ." my mind screeches out. "Momma, Momma, do you hear that?" as I'm slapping her on her diminutive backside under the fuzzy hotel blanket. "Huh, what?" She snorts as she is dragged from placid slumber. "What's that sound?" she says, suddenly quite lucid. "It sounds like an Arab terrorist yelling the GPS coordinates of our hotel to a suicide bomber" I stolidly whisper. Then sensing my calm demeanor, she asks me what we're going to do. "I'm going to call the front desk and complain" I reply indignantly and then clumsily fumble the handset from the phone.

Now it is at this instant when my gut assessment of the moment begins to distill upon my psyche. I slowly remove the receiver from my ear and whisper/shout the words, "THE PHONE IS DEAD!!" Incidentally, I might mention that I was truly pooping my pj's at this point. And that I forgot to point out that our room has one of those adjoining doors. It conveniently adjoins to the room where Habib is still bellowing his marching orders to the black van full of Jihadists. So thats why I initially believed the howling was originating in OUR room. It was hardly being muffled by the door that was really only a door in name only. It was then that all those years of training as a Marine kicked in. My senses were fully aware of all the smells, sights and sounds going on in all of the rooms on this floor of this wing of the hotel. I quickly had a mental map of all the exits reachable for a family of 4 that included two small children, one of whom wasn't yet potty trained. . . What's that you ask? Marine? O.K. so I wasn't "technically" a Marine. I was a Navy Seabee. But we wore Marine uniforms. And once I spent two weeks on a Marine base. I even saw some Marines doing push-ups in the rain. (you'd think they would have issued them umbrellas or something. I mean, I could see one or two of them forgetting to bring their umbrella, but all of them at the same time? Unlikely!) Alright so I was a reservist and only trained one weekend a month . . . and we didn't really "train" we mostly sat around telling stories to each other, but I did get to shoot an M16-A1 once. I shot 5 rounds through it. . . That's all we were issued, it was during the Clinton years and funding was scarce.

Where was I . . . oh yea, so I jumped out of bed and flipped on the bedside lamp. Hastily dragging the end table away from the wall to see why the phone didn't have a dial tone, I discovered that someone previously had unplugged the phone and didn't plug it back in. So fixing that, I was able to call the front desk and report the queer happenings next door. Then I climbed back into bed and waited for the repercussions to begin.

Minutes elapsed before I finally heard the hammer being dropped on my WMD wielding neighbor. (knocking heard next door. "Sir we're getting complaints that you're being too noisy" a mousy adolescent voice peeps. "Great", I think to myself. Now he knows that someone is on to him. "hmmm", he'll think to himself. "I wonder if the infidel could be on the other side of this mysterious extra door I have in my room" " I could easily crash through it and pummel the capitalist Christian dog with the butt of my AK-47 before he has a chance to unroll his prayer rug." "Alright!" his voice rattles back to the pimply faced over-night desk clerk. Then, almost immediately, as I'm beginning to think "Let that be a lesson to you", my nomadic neighbor goes back to dispensing his verbal assault on the unseen co-conspirator) Within minutes, however, the phone call ends, and, as hard as I fight to remain vigilant in the protection of my little ones, the adrenaline burns out and I slowly lose my grip on consciousness.

So, next morning as Momma and I fill the styrofoam bowls with Toasty-'O's, I say, "What do you make of that last night?" "Weird." She replies. "Yup" I mumble through milky lips. "But on the bright side, we have hot water."

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