We're Stuck in Where? Lodi, California

Was a murder committed here?

No, not quite that bad but that sure looks like some blood stains on this sheet. At any rate, the housekeeping staff of this particular hotel has been neglecting to change the sheets on the sofabed in this room.

It’s been a rough drive. Leaving on a Thursday night to avoid the Memorial Day Weekend Friday night traffic jam, it was smooth sailing over the Grapevine and into Bakersfield.  Soon, we hit the multi-lane closure at Famoso

OK, we’re past that but then the multi-lane closure at McFarland, and the multi-lane closure at Delano, and the multi-lane closure at Pixley, and the multi-lane closure at Visalia…and on and on all the way to Stockton.

What should have been a fairly uneventful 5 or 6 hour drive stretches to 8 as we finally arrive in our destination of Lodi after midnight.

We’re in town but can’t find the hotel. Finally, we pull over and fire up the Kindle to map it out. It’s another 10 mile drive west when we finally find the hotel on an empty part of the Central Valley along Interstate 5, far away from the town the hotel’s website said it was in.

I complain to the night desk clerk about it, “you’re nowhere near Lodi. How can you say you’re located there?”

“We get that a lot,” the clerk replies.

“I want to cancel the last three days of our reservation,” I tell him.

“You’ll have to take it up with the manager in the morning,” he tells me.

Very tired but not willing to put Tim to sleep in a dried up pool of someone else’s blood, I head back down with another complaint, “no one has changed the sheets on the sofabed.”

“Can I move you to another room?” he asks.  Not unless it’s an accessible room I tell him.

Five minutes later, the desk clerk is in our room making the bed offering profuse apologies.

In the morning, we put the bags back in the van, march into the front office, and promptly check out before walking next door to McDonalds for a quick breakfast of Sausage McMuffins before traveling on. 

This was to be a trip to Lodi, now we’re stuck here (hey, sounds like a song) with no room on a very busy holiday weekend.  How will this work out?

Stay tuned…

Darryl

Copyright 2013 – Darryl Musick

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