Throw Back Thursday: No Room At The Inn

I promised you the second part of a story I posted a few days back. You can find that story here. Throwback Thursday on Saturday: Blowout So on to the next part of that trip, which was experienced and written back in 2005. It does not feel like over 20 years ago. I am getting so old.

No Room At the Inn

By Anna Maria Junus

Do not travel through Montana and Idaho during the month of August.

I'm not the type of person who books things. If I'm traveling by car, I'm often not sure of where I'm going to end up. With my sense of direction, I could be building an igloo instead of watching a bullfight.

Added to that, there could be unexpected things that come up. Such as my car exploding. So my wandering forty years in the wilderness after going through the wrong border, and my blowout on the side of the road in Montana meant that I was way behind the schedule I thought I would be. Added to that, I had to be in Sandy, Utah by 1:00 the next day so that my admiring fans could meet me.

Okay, there aren't admiring fans yet, but that's what I was going down there to get. Of course it's a little harder when there's no actual book to sign, but that's beside the point.

It was late by the time I got to Idaho Falls, Idaho and there was no room at the inn. Any inn. "Go to Blackfoot," I was told.

So on to Blackfoot. "Try Pocotello," they told me.

And on to Pocotello. There was simply no room at the inn, and no one had a stable either. Everything was booked from Montana to Utah.

"You could try Ogden." Ogden was two hours away. I drove. My eyes were wide open as if my eyelashes were glued to my eyebrows. I could do this, I thought. And then I realized at 1:00 in the morning that I was in overdrive, just begging for an accident, and I wasn't wearing clean underwear.

I pulled off the highway and looked for a truck stop. My worst fear was coming true. I would have to sleep in my car! It was something I was afraid of when I started out. Now here I was, in a dark corner in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country in the middle of the night, surrounded by big trucks which could be hiding a psycho killer or an angel.

It was then I realized being in trouble is so much better when you have someone to be in trouble with.

I locked my doors and cuddled up with my pillows and quilt (what, you think I would go on a car trip without them?) in the front passenger seat.

My feet weren't elevated. I need to have my feet elevated.

Oh sure, I can fall asleep in a chair in the middle of the day while watching TV, but at nighttime I need to lie down with my feet up. It's just a quirk I have. In motel rooms I have to pull out the tucked-in sheets too, so that I'm not trapped. Another quirk I have. I also can't stand to watch eating contests.

But I digress, which is another quirk I have. It drives me nuts when other people do it, and they start telling a story, and then something sends them off on another tangent, leaving you hanging for the punch line.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  So I moved to the back seat where I could lie down and put my feet up. Which would have been fine if I were three foot six.

Now the only way I could stretch out was to sleep with my feet on the ceiling. This may be a good Pilates position, but it wasn't a real comfortable sleeping position. I know flies can sleep with their feet on the ceiling, but they also have a hundred eyeballs.

So I curled up and tried not to think about hand hooks on the car door, guys in hockey masks, or demented clowns.

And I lived to tell about it.