Luckily, I wasn’t pregnant, nor were we traveling by donkey, but it still wasn’t optimal. We walked away from the hotel lobby desk considering the prospect of hunting for another room in Kansas City.
But…but…I was starving. And my husband was clearly tired of driving. We decided to grab some food while we discussed the options. So we went to Arthur Bryant’s where we ordered a huge slab of ribs and some random sides.
The ribs were good, the sauces were good, but I’ll admit that I wasn’t a spectacularly good critic at the moment. Except for some coffee in the morning and road snacks, this was my first meal of the day. I barely remembered to snap photos before I dug in.
As hungry as I was, I ended up with nearly a half-slab of ribs left, and I wasn’t about to leave them behind, so I packed them up in a handy Styrofoam box, tossed in some of the pickles, squirted on some sauce, and when I got a quizzical look from my spouse, I said that I’d toss ‘em in the cooler with our traveling beverages and they’d be my lunch on the road the next day.
After chowing down, hubster said that instead of trying to find a place in KC, we should head to the next populated town and look for a room, but he was beat. I said I could drive, and he said that he figured a short nap would do him some good. So…we decided that I’ll kill a little time in the casino, he’d nap in the car, and then we’d hit the road for maybe another hour, or the next reasonable town that looked like it would have a hotel.
Oh, bummer. I wanted to hit a KC grocery store and pick up some local stuff…but I figured the next town would probably be fine and we’d both be in better shape in the morning for a grocery excursion.
The ribs had rejuvenated me, so I pulled a twenny out of my wallet and went to win my fortune. I was ready to quit pretty quickly, but thought that hubster would be better off after a bit of a longer snooze, so I pulled out another twenny and this time did a little better.
I figured he’d napped long enough, so I went to wake him for the next leg of our journey. And as I was about to leave, I thought I’d check on room availability. The clerk said there was no one left on the waiting list, but it would take her a few minutes to go through everything and see if anything was available.
I paced for a while and a room was ours. A ginormous room. Okay, not a suite, but it certainly wasn’t Motel Cheap, either. First things first. I fired up the laptop, and looked for a wireless signal to latch onto. Nope. I was about to call the desk when I spotted a network cable and a sheet with instruction on how to log on the hotel’s network. Okie dokie.
I checked email, checked Facebook, made sure the previous day’s blog post had gone up on time, and answered an email from the Left Hand Valley Courier, where I’m the editor.
That’s a whole other story. When I was leaving, the current monthly edition was on it’s semifinal round of editing. Someone else was supposed to cover for me, but she got called out of town unexpectedly and urgently, so I was on the hook again. I got that done just before I left, but I left one little bit undone and had to tie that up so I could carry on with a clear conscience.
I shut down my connection with the universe.
Rejuvinated at the thought of not having to drive again that night, we wandered back to the casino where hubster lost his twenny and I won it back. In the end, we broke about even and I had some fun seeing four aces on a video poker machine and three 7’s on a slot machine.
Ka-ching!
