Not Your Average Complaint

My husband travels for work pretty often - I would say on average we spend a couple days per month at a hotel. In all of our seven years of marriage we have only spent one night apart, so naturally, our entire family packs up and travels with Adam when he goes on these business trips. His employer pays for all travel expenses and hotels, which has been a true blessing. I love the road trips and all the swimming experiences we've had. We got the chance to stay at a hotel that had a RIVER running through a huge jungle of water slides and water falls a while ago! That was a blast! But with all the fun we have it is also very stressful and it DOES get old. I know that must sound ungrateful, but I am a home-dweller. I love simple living, maybe going on a weekend camping trip or exploring the woods. That's my version of fun. But I do enjoy the road trips, breaking our daily routine, and not having to clean. :) We just got home from one of these business trips and I just have to share our experience. I'm not trying to complain, but this is not your average complaint and, I think, worthy of a blog post. ;)

We left home at 6am on Monday morning and drove to Plymouth, Minnesota. I dropped Adam off for his meetings and drove to a gas station to kill some time. The kids and I spent our morning playing I Spy, singing songs, doing some simple school, and discovering what all of the buttons, knobs, and gadgets in our huge van do. The passenger window went up and down a few thousand times. We had fun! My kids are great with road trips and they are great waiters. Around mid morning I strapped Harmoni to my chest in the baby backpack, and then I gathered all the kids together and we squeezed into the 6x6 foot bathroom in the gas station. Everybody went pee, faces and hands were washed, and shoes were being tied when I heard two ladies chatting loudly outside the door saying, "Someone has been in there for 10 minutes, this is ridiculous. Can't you open the door?" I stood up from awkwardly reaching around Harmoni to tie shoes and opened the door to see two women decked out in business suites and fake tans. I smiled while whisking all 6 of us past their nasty glares. As uncomfortable and judged as they made me feel, I couldn't help but also feel sorry for them. I am living the dream! Spending quality time with the babies that I birthed. Learning about them and shaping them to be the men and women that they should be (well, that's the goal, anyway). These women had probably just gotten done dropping their children off at the local day care center or school, and by the time they see their kids again they will ALL be worn out from their terrible day of waiting their turn for the bathroom and taking care of their employer's tasks. Doing everything for everyone else. So judge away you perfectly manicured, professionally dry-cleaned ladies. My shoe-tying, baby-wearing, poop-wiping, face-kissing days are far more fulfilling and everlasting than the 30 years that you will put into your career. I AM successful - or at least I hope to be.

Whew. Done with that rant. :P So we went back to the van for some lunchables and more song-singing until we were able to check into the hotel at 1pm. The woman at the front desk was so unbelievably rude to me. Getting information out of her was like mining for coal. She didn't tell me where my room was, didn't tell me that there wasn't an elevator, didn't tell me where to find the stairs, and after walking around the hotel for 15 minutes I finally was able to pry some basic directions from her. She watched as I struggled with getting the kids and several heavy bags up the flight of stairs to our 2nd floor room, without so much as an offer to help. No, I take that back. She did offer to help, I said yes, and she then answered the phone and turned her back towards me. After standing there for a minute I finally just walked away. At the top of the stairs a guest at the hotel insisted on helping me take the bags to our room. He was an angel, I am convinced. :) Once we were settled in our room we all took a nap. After his meetings, Adam walked to the hotel and we went swimming until 10pm. It was so much fun! Then we ran up to our room, got dressed, and came back down to the hotel restaurant and enjoyed chocolate milk for the kids, apple cider mojitos for the grown ups, and freshly popped popcorn that was complimentary. We all headed back up to the room for some sleep at around 11pm. The next morning Adam had to attend meetings all day again, so he went to the front desk to ask if the kids and I could get a late checkout. He also told the manager about how unhelpful the woman at the front desk was the previous day. Adam didn't know it at the time, but the lady was working again that morning and she obviously heard Adam complaining to her manager about her.

Now here comes the good part. At 10am I woke up to nurse my sweet little baby. The curtains were closed, the kids were all still snoring, when suddenly, at 10:15 the FIRE ALARM goes off. LOUD, SCREECHING, and ONLY in our room. Then the entire 2nd floor alarm starts going off. The kids woke up in a panic. I instructed them to grab their shoes and follow me. I grabbed my purse and room key, threw on my shoes, and calmly herded them out the door while clutching Harmoni to my chest. Austin was about to cry, Heidi was clinging to my leg, Alvin was trying to run down the hall in the wrong direction, and Aidin was turning in circles. I was SHAKING. Like, full-body shaking. All I could think of was getting the kids safely out of the hotel before the building fell in or smoke filled the hall. We were at the end of the hall about to go downstairs and suddenly everything went quiet. I realized that NO ONE else was evacuating. I peeked into a room and asked the cleaning lady what had happened and she said with a PERFECT English accent, "I don't know." I kept asking, "Is there a fire? Is it just a drill? Should I go back to my room?" and her answer every time was, "I don't know." She said it with a smirk on her face, and finally I caught on and asked, "Do you know English?" (I KNEW she did. She was listening to normal music and had a normal accent like mine) and she said no. She just kept answering "I don't know" as if it was a big joke. So we went back to our room where I finished nursing, gave the kids some dry cereal, got all of us dressed, my makeup on, and bags packed and loaded in the van - all very quickly. When we checked out at 11am I asked about the alarms going off and the woman at the front desk - the one who was so rude to me the day before - stood there with this little ugly smile on her face and said that it was a routine fire drill. No apology. No explanation. No warning. When we were driving home Adam and I called several other hotel chains, including other locations of the same chain we had just stayed at, and they ALL said the same thing - when they do fire drills they ALWAYS warn their guests. Every time. That is STANDARD policy. This was NOT a routine fire drill - it was a cruel prank meant to harass me and terrorize my children. Upon talking to the manager of that location we discovered that there wasn't a routine fire drill scheduled for this morning, and he said that the woman told him the alarm was inadvertently turned on when the restaurant was fixing something or whatever. She told ME that it WAS a routine fire drill, so clearly this was just a big JOKE to her. I'm going to follow through with this and report it to every rating site and review board that I can find. I am so deeply angry about it. The reason it bothers me SO much is because I thought my children were in danger. I thought it was real and it struck intense fear in all of us. That woman should lose her job for being a terrorist and for abusing crucial fire safety drills.

Like I said. NOT your average complaint. I just want to move to our new home and never leave the house again. :P