2003-07-25 ~ 7:50 p.m.

When It Says Motel, You Say No-tel.

I have some sad news. As some of you probably already knew, there are no longer happy fruit-shaped bottles of juice. (hanging head)

WHY GOD WHY??? They say you are a loving God, a just God, a forgiving God, but yet you leave me on an earth with no fruit-shaped bottles of fruit. Are you still pissed off about the apple thing?

Right..... so....we borrow his parent's old-person car. (Ya know, the ones that take up one and a half lanes.) And we drive our way down to L.A. We had decided we'll stay at a little motel and sleep for 5 or 6 hours, then go to the big Double M. Well, you can't really reserve a room for the same night on Orbitz, and sometimes they don't pick up their phone after 10 or so. So, yeah, you just kinda go wherever you can.

Yes. It was that horrifying.

Firstly, it was one of those places where the owner(s) actually live there. So, they're not actually at the window at night. So, you wake them up. And, you ever notice how people are really bitchy when you wake them up?

The Fiance (Rally Edition) had called earlier and asked if how much and if there would be someone to let us in, and the guy said, "Well, ring the bell and someone might come." and Fiance was all "might?" so, guy said, "ok, yes, someone will come to the window."

So, when we show up, we have to ring the bell a lot. A whole bunch. I mean, yeah, I guess I would have been bitchy if there were people at my door seemingly restlessly ringing. Especially if the ringing was one of those grating buzzers.

So, when queen of the living dead came to the window, she greeted us with a gracious, "What do you want?" God, I love customer service of the millenium. We said that we would like to check in. And she came back at us with, "We don't have any rooms." I mentioned my love of mad cs skills, si? So, my favorite fiance said, "Ah, we talked to Mike and he told us that it would be no problem to get us in, gave us a price and everything."

You could hear her brain-workings. It was like you could see it flash across her face {I swear to GOD I'll kill that motherfucking son of a}"oh." So, she got our info, our card, made sure we knew that we would have to check out at 11 like everyone else and that there was no late check out policy.

It was a great start.

Even better, when we were getting our stuff out of the car, we were having a little banter about conversation, you know. Then I realized I could no longer hear him. It wasn't that I was going deaf. It was that there was a HUGE....LONG.....TRAIN passing right next to us.

And we laughed.

Then we went to the room. It was a step above basic. They had the TV, a fridge and microwave even, a closet, kinda, and a GOD AWFUL bathroom.

Ugh. I'm going into dry heaves thinking about it. For some odd reason, they even furnish their rooms with a toothbrush holder cup and then another cup to rinse and spit with. Seriously, a little yellow happy face plastic set. I had to take the gander and, yes, there was that funk build up at the bottom of the toothbrush holder cup. The tub....ugh.... and the shower head... Oh GOD.... black. It was black. I *think* that early in its life, it was clear, but those days were long past. Even the toilet paper sucked. I've seen sucky toilet paper in my time. The rough type. Thin type. All that. This stuff pulled apart before the handy perforation. We had to tear it where we wanted it otherwise we'd get a pinch of toilet paper between our fingers. We decided that we weren't going to take a shower the next day. Hell, we were going to an amusement park anyway. We'd be stinky and sweaty after an hour.

This is when I made The Fiance to promise, promise, promise me that no matter how bad things are, we never again stay somewhere with the word "motel" in the name.

(Funny story, when I found out where we were staying, I asked, "What about Budget Suites or Holiday Inn Express that you were looking up?" He said that either no one answered or he couldn't find a number. I said that Holiday Inn was probably 1-800-holidayinn or something... the next day we looked at the Magic Mountain brochure. They have numbers to close by hotels. One being Holiday Inn. Then they listed one local number OR 1-800-HOLIDAY... damn I'm good.)

Since we weren't getting a lot of sleep, we decided to set the alarm clock, which there was one. Of course, we were puzzled as to why it wasn't plugged into the wall. First, the top plug in the wall was covered with black electric tape. That couldn't be good. Regardless, I plugged it in.....and it started BLARING at me. On closer inspection, it seemed the last person to use it didn't feel like being awake when it went off and they SMASHED the snooze button in.

Good times.

I'll write about the rest of our adventures later. Until then, be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

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