Travel

Sorry Motel, I Wasn’t Young & Drunk Enough To Enjoy My Stay

Now that we can travel again, I need my joints to cooperate.

Photo by Dylan Fout on Unsplash

Few things indicate to me that I am aging as much as trying to sleep in a bed other my own. I love to go places, and since money was always sparse in my pockets, I’ve done mostly budget travel. I have slept in haunted Irish farm houses, on Italian train station floors, and in Swiss multi-bunk hostels. I’ve even slept in a Roman convent, under Jesus’ melancholy gaze, with nun judgement upon me after missing their evening curfew. All those nights, I dozed soundly.

But those nights were decades ago, and last night, I absolutely could not succumb to sweet rest in a Pioneer Valley motel in Massachusetts. It was more than the incessant banging in the room above, or the lump in the middle of the bed that made me feel as though I was about to roll off it. I was my arm that tingles, my hip that aches and my neck that stiffens up. It was about how I struggle to adjust my feet so they don’t suddenly cramp up, and make me jump from the bed in pain. It was about how many times I banged into bags as I walked to the bathroom in the dark.

Staying in a motel when I was youthful and full of booze, was fine. It was fine for the people I traveled with, too.