Scenes from a Comfort Inn

Thursday, Aug. 23, 2012

We have had a very nice day, due in no small part to our stay at the Comfort Inn in Cross Lanes, WV.  As I wrote this morning, we realized we would be here all day, so we settled in for the duration. After I posted my quick update, I went to the exercise room to use the treadmill--I was feeling itchy and just wanted to move a little bit rather than sit. I was so good--I walked for 30 minutes, and then I even used a couple of the other machines to give my arms some fun [grin]. After that, I came back to the room. When Joe said, "Sit down," I thought, "Uh oh!"

Sure enough, it was disappointing news. Joe had talked to Tim at the Ford place, and they are now telling us they will not be finished working on Mo until Monday. Needless to say, my heart sank... and Joe sure looked miserable about it. I quickly ran a few scenarios by him of how we might handle this setback, and he wanted to "think" about it for a bit (he was also deep into his book by then.) So, I left him to "think" and, I hoped, relax, and I went to the pool and had a delightful swim. As you can see from the photo, the pool at this motel is nicer even than many pools at much more "upscale" places. I felt like I was on a cruise; it was glassed in on 3 sides and had that wonderful indoor-pool smell and was so pretty (it even had a waterfall, and mosaics on the walls). I ignored the parking lot--you can't have everything, right?

Even though I mostly don't like swimming that much, this was just perfect, and helped me calm down and think about what would be the best thing to do. The biggest handicap we have in this situation is having Roxy with us. We can only stay in hotels which accept dogs, which greatly limits our options (the Comfort Inn chain is wonderful for this, but there is not always one right where we might be.)  Even more limiting is the fact that we can't leave her alone in the room, and we can't take her with us to any "attractions" we might go to, and we certainly can't leave her in the car in this hot weather. So unless we find attractions with a kennel (Disney World?) or kennel her in each city we go to for a day, or leave her here in a kennel until we come back for Mo, we really can't do much. Juggling kennels and hotels was just not realistic.

So we decided we are going to spend the weekend with Ed in Floyd, VA. But the motel is so nice, we decided to stay here for tonight anyway rather than leave this afternoon. It's relaxing and comfortable and we held a wan hope that at the end of today, Tim might say he was unduly pessimistic and we can have Mo tomorrow.

I shared this conclusion with Joe, who agreed he'd be happy staying here until tomorrow. But we did agree, we did NOT want to spend the day in our room. So we packed a few things and went to Arby's for lunch (we ate in the car with the AC on, with Roxy) and Walmart for a gallon of water.  Then we found a municipal park about 3 miles or so from our hotel. We found a wonderful, deeply shady spot where we set up our  chairs, the dog's dish, and tied the leash to the tree, and then we plopped down for almost 3 hours to read. The breeze blew, the shade was lovely, there were no insects to bother us, and it was just very sweet. I should have taken a better photo of Joe than the one at the top of this blog, but you can get the idea.

At about 5:30 we packed up and headed home, after discussing dinner. We decided to eat "at home" tonight (I mentioned we took all our refrigerated food, which we transferred to the refrigerator in our room, so we are quite well stocked!) We stopped again at Walmart and picked up some baked potatoes, steamable green beans, and salt and pepper (I didn't think of packing the spices from the RV.) And then we came back to the Comfort Inn. We nuked the potatoes and beans in the microwave in our room, and Joey set up the grill on the picnic table where he grilled two filet mignons (gifts from one of his patients, which we had brought with us.) And we had ourselves a filet mignon dinner sitting at our picnic table. It was perfect and delicious.

So that was our day. It is now almost 8:30pm. We plan to check out of here at noon tomorrow, and check in at that point with Tim one last time. Assuming he still tells us Monday, we will head to Eddie's house after lunch. If he thinks there's a chance he MIGHT be finished tomorrow night, we will spend another afternoon in a park someplace and check back at the end of the afternoon. We can always leave here later if there seems to be a hope of waiting. Floyd, VA is 3 hours 15 minutes from here. We planned to stop and visit Eddie on our way home, but seeing him this weekend will be fine--it behooves us to be flexible, and luckily he is okay with us descending on him at the last minute. And then we'll come back Monday morning, hopefully to retrieve a repaired Mo, and continue on our way.

Let's just hope!