There are many wrong places that people can find ourselves in. We are warned to stand in Holy Places. By standing in Holy Places, we are less likely to find ourselves in any kind of trouble. Holy places are usually defined as a church, a temple, our family homes, and other places where we are less exposed to the “world” and worldly things. One time, we were visiting Los Angeles where I was attending a conference for the University where I worked. It so happened that we decided to go somewhere nice to eat, somewhere away from the safe hotel complex environment. It wasn’t but a few blocks away that we found ourselves lost in that huge and massive city where directions are minimal and you could drive for hours in any direction and never see anything that looks familiar. There were no mountains on the east that we often use to help us maintain our direction in Utah. In Utah, a person always knows where they are, because the directional signs are excellent bar none, better than anywhere else we have ever been. But, I regress, we were not in Utah, we were in the huge city of Los Angeles. We somehow found ourselves in a very slummy and scary area of the city without an obvious escape route. Every way we turned took us to an even worse looking area of the slums. If we had been there on a humanitarian mission, we may have felt comfortable, but as well-dressed people driving a fancy car and looking fairly plush, we were anything but comfortable. In fact, the women were beginning to be very worried. Fortunately, we did not fall prey to a gang; we somehow found our way out of that area and to a place where we felt like we were back in a less threatening environment.
Trips are fun, and it is healthy for people to get away from time to time to break the monotony of life and the routine of living the same way day after day. Getting away can sometimes, as mentioned above, be an adventure that is more than we had planned on, such as it was in Los Angeles. They say the best laid plans of mice and men can turn out to be a challenge greater than we could ever have anticipated. When we have gone on trips with others, such as our son and daughter-in-law, they were responsible for all the planning, and because they have a lot of experience traveling, everything seems to go smoothly. When experience is missing and the novice, or better put, the ignorant, are left in charge, bad things can and do happen. On a recent trip to South Dakota, our son, mentioned above, was asked to use his expertise to make arrangements on the Internet for our first nights stay. It was a beautiful motel—well-decorated and very clean with a deli- cious breakfast ready for us in the morning before we departed. However, we decided that the next night, on our way home, we would drive until it started getting dark and find a place along the highway when we were tired and ready to stop. We stopped in a fairly large city and started looking for a reasonable, but nice motel, such as we had the night before. We actually saw one of the same hotels belonging to the chain of hotels where we stayed the previous night. It was right off the freeway, and we thought we were fortunate to find a very large and nice Holiday Inn. When I enquired at the desk for the cost for one nights stay, I was sur- prised to find the price more than twice what they had charged the previous night for the same accommodations—exactly $195.00 for one night. I can remember distinctly (a time from my past) when I stayed in a Motel 6 for six dollars. That, of course, was a few years ago, maybe 50 or so. I asked the clerk if that was a down payment on the room with an option to buy. She just smiled and then, with a very straight face, said again that the room for one night was $195. I slinked out of the lobby, and we looked for a less fancy place to lay us down to sleep for a few hours. Not even a block away we saw a bright neon sign “The Inn” with a vacancy sign in the window. We stopped, and I went into the office and asked how much it cost to stay there for the night? The woman, most likely from India, stated that a room for the night was $89 + tax. That was less than half what they asked for next door, so I thought that we probably could not do better than that. The long row of rooms were almost a block long in a semicircle and each rooms outside door faced the parking lot. Most of the rooms were occupied. I felt that “occupancy” was a clue as to the quality of the establishment. We drove over to the designated room, and as we went into the room, we found it very hard to close and lock the door and ended up being able to lock only the lock on the doorknob (not safe). The room did not have a fresh smell, and I noticed the floor had an old carpet that did not look like it had been vacuumed for some time, let alone shampooed. I suggested to my wife that she not walk around barefoot as she usually does at night. Only three of the six light bulbs would switch on so that the three 50-watt bulbs that would come on did not reveal to us any more than necessary. The bathroom seat was so scarred up and abused that it had to have been thirty years old (minimally). There was black mold around the perimeter of the bathtub, assuring us that we would not be bathing in the morning. While trying to wash my hands in the sink, I turned the faucet handle to the left to get hot water, and it was very cold and would not vary. I washed in cold water. I reached for a towel; there were none. So I went to the office and asked for some towels which were brought over. Later, my wife, wanting to get a cold drink, turned the faucet to the right for cold water, and it turned very warm. So we concluded that the normal faucet handle nomenclature had been reversed, therefore hot to the right and cold to the left. We went out to a nearby McDonalds for some supper, and when we returned, we decided to watch a little TV, but laying on the bed, we found that we could not get the TV to turn on with the remote, so we had to get up in order to change channels by using the controls directly on the unit. Most motels have two beds in each room, and we would ordinarily each take a bed so we wouldn’t disturb each other during the night. I selected one of the beds, and when I threw the cover back in order to get in, I noticed a big round wet spot still very damp from the night before. My wife suggested that we leave and try to get our money back. It was late, and since her bed looked tolerable, I said let’s both just sleep in this one so we can get up and leave early in the morning. We would have been another hour or two finding another motel with no assurance it would be any better. It was a little chilly that evening, and so I tried to turn the heat up a little. I went to the dual heater/air
conditioner unit and turned it over to “heat” expecting that within a minute or two, we would hear it humming and feel some heat being distributed around the room. The room remained cold, so on top of everything else, the heater did not work. We went to bed and prayed that we would be able to leave that motel from hell…without contracting some kind of disease, such as ebola or even worse. I slept a few minutes here and a few minutes there, and we were up and out of there by 5 o’clock. The only hope I had was that I might be able to get a few winks while driving to the next city. Just kidding! That was the only part of this whole narration where I was kidding; the rest was Goshen’s truth. As we were leaving, I tried to see if there was actually a name for the place other than “The Inn.” I thought for sure that it would have a name such as “Bates Motel.” Please enjoy reading about our brief night of misery, for that may be the only value received from the $90+ spent for that “highlight” of our trip and, hopefully, a once in a lifetime experience. It was hardly a holy place.