Joy was determined to get a good night’s rest after a couple of nights of not sleeping well, so she took some Advil PM, quickly drank two of the bitter Sculpin IPAs she had purchased at Walgreen's, inserted her earplugs, and sternly warned me NOT to snore.

Normally caffeine-free, I had unwisely consumed a large quantity of caffeinated raspberry-flavored tea at Subway. And then I compounded that mistake by drinking some of Joy’s Diet Pepsi. So I was already wide awake when we went to bed at our usual hour: 9:00.

Our room at the Red Lion was near an end entrance. I’d noticed earlier that a piercing alarm sounded whenever someone opened the exterior door. Unlike every other modern hotel I’ve visited, anyone could open this door from the outside, without a room key. To overcome this obvious security flaw, the hotel managers had installed the piercing alarm, and (I learned the next day) had also placed a mirror so that the person at the front desk could, in theory, monitor who was entering the hotel through the unsecured door. At the time we moved into our room I didn’t understand this half-assed system, and assumed that the door would be locked at night. It wasn’t, and until approximately 3:00 AM the alarm sounded every 15 minutes or so, preventing me from sleeping. As I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I began to construct elaborate theories about who was opening the door so early in the morning — was drug dealing taking place at this hotel? Prostitution? Burglary?

The next morning as we checked out (to move in to the relatively luxurious Holiday Inn Express across the street, where I’d previously reserved a room for two days), I questioned the manager about the door, and learned that the alarm was installed because there actually HAD been burglaries — thieves had come in through the unlocked doors to steal sheets and towels, of all things. So maybe my 3:00 AM paranoia wasn’t paranoia after all.

Bottom line: Don’t stay at the Red Lion Hotel in Grants, New Mexico.

The rest of our time in Grants was mostly spent eating, sleeping, working on this blog (me) and performing preventive maintenance on the bikes (Joy). We also made a few trips to a nearby Wal-Mart, where walking up and down the aisles made me as tired as pedaling a heavy bicycle up a mountain. Joy laughed at my “love-hate relationship with civilization.”

Tomorrow we get back on the road, into one of the more wild and water-less parts of the entire route.

Heart

2

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply