Two weeks ago, to round out summer, my mom offered that,
if I could come up with a cost-effective last-hurrah summer trip itinerary for me, her, and the girls, she would pay for it.
The thought of this idea completely thrilled me.
I had been dying for something else memorable before my middle daughters’ senior year began, and many years ago, when I was a single mom of my oldest daughter,
my mom used to take me and her on some really epic trips.
I was excited for the prospect again.
As she is on a fixed income now, however, I knew the mention of it needing to be “cost effective” was an important one, so I set out to plan a three night road trip down the California coast as cheaply, yet enjoyable as possible.
My husband could stay home with 6 needy animals.
This would be another all-girl’s trip, just like camping was, so we needed him to take one for the team. He was overjoyed to be informed.
For hours I researched destinations, restaurants, and activities, and finally settled on a plan that would have us stopping in several well-loved places, and a few brand new ones.
(At least for the girls)
The method for saving costs I came up with was
*The Real Piece de Resistance*
Planning to stay one night in a cheap motel.
When I say this out loud now, mind you, the sky flashes and thunder rolls.
The Motel 6 I landed on had good reviews, though!
“At least better than other ones!”
“We probably wouldn’t be murdered so close to the ocean.”
“People are more relaxed, more zen out there.”
(This is how I justified it)
With all the other things we would be doing, just one night “will be fine,” I said.
“It will be fun!”
Spoiler Alert:
I now know that “It will be fine” is the famous last phrase of any family trip.
The trip started off magical in Pismo Beach, then next Solvang – a delightful Danish town with picturesque windmills, shops, and bakeries lining the streets.
However, there were five of us, of a broad range of ages, moods, ability to cope, and life experiences checking into that Motel 6 on our final day.
Another bridge I’d chosen to cross when we got to it was that we’d booked a room with only two queen beds for five people, because that’s all they had left at the time.
“It will be fine,” again I said.
This motto will forever burn in my mind.
It became a chant.
As the preteen was a “secret kid” on this specific part of the itinerary, I told her to go hide in a bush until we could get checked in, open the room, and bring in all our stuff.
Her eyeballs watched from the foliage of a large topiary bush so no one would come in a white collared shirt to tell us about breaking the fire code.
“I’ve never stayed in a MOTEL before,” the fifteen year old excitedly said before we opened the door, but from the moment it swung inward and she saw the inside,
I could tell by her body language, even from behind her,
she realized there was nothing she had missed out on.
Originally I’d thought on this last night we’d get food from a grocery store and bring it back to the room to play games in order to make our last night feel sort of “sleepover style:”
Yes. A true cedar chest of memories.
We’d be saving money that way!
*Clicks “Book it now”*
I narrowly sold it with a “We’ll make the best of it!”
I had neglected to contemplate the moods we’d all be in after going grocery shopping while starving, and riding for 4 hours in the car in 108 degree heat earlier that day.
The bag of snacks I’d also packed to save on costs had turned into a thing we hated.
The “Can’t” in “Cantaloupe” is apparently from what happens when you take it in and out of a hotel mini fridge and cart it around in a car until it is day three.
If I’m honest, I’ve seen more cheerful sleepovers on Elm Street.
Within 5 minutes in that room, plastered floor to ceiling in dark wood linoleum, I’d commanded the preteen to go take an extra long shower, after she refused to calm down, just to give myself a break.
(Perhaps there had been a toxin in that bush?)
I had told her to stop screeching and bouncing. We had NEIGHBORS in the next room, for heaven’s sake.
Clearly no Motel 6 ever spent one penny of your nightly fee on thickening the walls.
She responded that she had seen those neighbors, and it was fine because they were two men,
and “men don’t pay attention to anything.”
I slowly nodded. She had a point.
I still sent her off.
Dinner was eaten on the beds because in a Motel 6 there is just one sad plastic chair.
We climbed up on the beds like Willie Wonka’s Grandparents, rather than roshamboing for that one seat that looked like that’s where the Poltergeist is supposed to sit.
We all just sat and chewed and looked around at the laminate wood walls,
thinking our own falsely private thoughts that were plain by our faces,
until later in the night when my mom would mutter, “But it had good reviews, did it?”
I would have her know it had three stars.
I had borrowed a friend’s camping cot for the extra bed we would need
It took one person standing in the bathroom,
two with their heels tucked up on the beds,
three attitude adjustments,
and one person leaving the room completely just for me to have room to unfold it.
Have you ever tried unfolding something metal with low blood sugar when you are unfamiliar with it?
The sounds I made I cannot recreate without a full moon and some woods.
My family obviously did not notice I needed help, as they were disassociating.
I bet those men noticed them though.
We were so tightly packed in that room it felt like some Truman Show experiment.
It only had one small mirror – The Test of All Teens.
To exit the bathroom at any given time, anyone standing near the door had to shuffle backwards in a conga line like some sort of human slide-puzzle.
The looks the teens gave me while having to do this re-confirmed that this specific segment of my itinerary is where I had gone wrong.
As penance, I was given the spot on a bed that was approximately 5” from the wall.
Another fun discovery was that to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night later, I would have to insert my feet into the small crevasse there, then loudly shuffle along that path with the tip of my nose dragging along the sheetrock in order to not wake my mom.
Every time I plugged something in, my mom said she could smell burning.
We remedied this by just plugging and then unplugging, plugging and then unplugging.
The “Get in, get what you need, and get out” method.
Electricians we are not.
I simply read the fire escape plan to make myself feel better, and reminded myself, once again, that this was supposed to be fun.
Anyone who has ever been on a family road trip knows that day three is no time for extra closeness.
I know this now, also.
(Perhaps the knowledge of this burning into my memory was the source of the burning smell)
You’ve already been sleeping in a bed with someone’s hot breath in your ear for multiple nights. You’ve already been forced out of the bathroom with your hair wet, because of some supposed emergency, and had to then hear someone poop much to close to where you sit in your towel for comfort.
Day three is obviously the day for the nicest hotel.
The one with the really comfortable beds.
The one with the most room.
A Motel 6 bed is also not the place one should be eating a salad, especially if they are the type that contemplates any of the other people who have ever stayed in a Motel 6,
and how extensive a Motel 6’s sanitization processes probably are.
To make this matter worse, in regards to this salad – I forgot a fork.
There is nothing more ironic than being a woman whose last name is Green,
while you scoop a salad labeled “Green Goddess” into your mouth with just your cupped fingertips on a Motel 6 bed.
In the tone of my dear grandmother, I say,
“Goddess? My left foot.”
At one point while there I noticed my mother staring oddly into her open suitcase in a daze.
I asked her about it, and if I’d had to guess what she would say next,
what she did say would have been the very last thing.
She said she had counted her pairs of underwear and realized she was missing one.
Besides Day Three not being a day for extra closeness,
or motel bed salads,
it is also not the day to contemplate how your 76 year old mother lost her underwear somehow on your vacation,
and help her talk through where they maybe are.
The blessing in settling in that night came in the fact that at least we were all really tired.
Too tired to think too long, or look closely at anything around us anymore.
When the youngest begged not to have to sleep on the cot “under whatever that brown smear was,” her 16 year old sister offered to take it, and surprisingly swapped with her.
I’m pretty sure that act won her Martyr of the Trip.
After all, no one dreams of capping off their last summer of childhood pressed into the corner of a Motel 6 room, with their entire family under a mystery smear, on a folding metal cot.
I am pretty sure she was just thinking, “Whatever gets me home, to where my boyfriend is.”
Pure desperation can make one seem generous of heart..
Sure, this wasn’t the beauty of Solvang, or the down mattress pad of Pismo Beach.
Still we pressed on with our “sleepover” theme, all climbing into bed to begin playing the “Conversations” card game we had brought.
It is a game where you draw a card that poses contemplative questions,
and you go around answering them. You know. A Mom Game.
This game would thankfully serve to distract me from my now overwhelming thoughts:
Why did the sheets feel oddly damp all over?
Why did the bed feel progressively harder as the time went on?
Could mattresses actually be made of Oobleck?
Were these sheets a thread count of 24?
One of the first questions of the game was about naming what we most fear,
and my mom, who was tucked in bed next to me so tight it was as if she was hoping the deep compression of her nervous system would fix everything,
started in answering that question extremely seriously.
She couldn’t have seen, as she went on about her worries of having another stroke one day,
that the preteen had immediately leaned over to her sister when she’d heard the question and answered for her, simply mumbling the word, “Prices.”
My mother’s true greatest fear.
Surely this was based on her observations of my mom spending less time looking at sights on the trip, and more time squinting at any receipts that had been handed to her.
I tried to hold in a laugh then so hard I think my neck veins almost ruptured.
I was trying to be respectful of her stroke concerns, but
for three days now she HAD questioned every charge.
Leave it up to the preteen to call-out a thing.
The accuracy, the delirium, and then again the burning question –
WHY WAS THIS BED SO HARD?!
Before long, we were dissolved into uncontrollable laughter, so much we all could hardly breathe.
From that point on that night, we all crossed over into complete chaos,
no doubt from a combination of electric smoke, and probable drug fumes from a cheap motel’s neighboring rooms.
See! We were having fun, even though the room was Temu cheap.
We laughed ourselves to the point of crying over the ridiculousness of the situation:
Most bougie daughter curled in the fetal position in the corner of a Motel 6,
one daughter so hyperactive she got sent to the bathroom and pinned in,
me shuffling my way along the wall with my nose rubbing as I went,
the beds, the missing underwear, the silent dinner where, at one point, saved by the worry of eating another thing on those beds, we almost bit off eachother’s heads.
The best thing about that whole night was – It made us ready to go back home again.
As is usual for me, I was the last one up that night.
When I switched the light off for good to shuffle along my strip back into bed, there was one problem though –
The light outside our window on our makeshift porch was as bright as the actual sun.
It blazed through the windows, rendering the supposed blackout curtains useless.
(I snapped this photo without a flash at 1am)
Was this the bright light at the end of life they talk about?
“How fitting,” I smiled to myself. “I’m about to end this summer being taken up.”
They may have lied about the good rating, but they told the truth about one thing for sure:
They will be darned if they don’t leave that light on for you.
I have made a mental note now for any trip planning days that may be to come:
**Plan the bare-bones day as the first day, not the last, if saving money is a must. “While the air is fresh”**
It will surely give you laughs for years,
but when it comes to skimping on comfort, space, and amenities, friends –
Day three of family togetherness is simply NOT THE ONE.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
