On Wednesday night, I was on the phone with my boyfriend as he was driving down to Orlando for the wedding that he would be part of and I would be attending on Friday. Since it was getting rather late (close to midnight) and he had plenty of time the next day to continue the drive before the rehearsal fun began, he decided to stop over in a hotel for the night.
Without telling me where he was, he just happened to pick Lake City, Florida... which also just happens to be where all of my ex-in-laws live. For those who don't know, Lake City grew out of basically just a truck stop along the way between Orlando and Atlanta. Somehow over the last decade or so, Lake City realized that it could cash in on more than just trucker pit-stoppage and several hotels and restaurants sprung up right around the interstate to reap some coins from road-weary vacationers.
Another little side note that I should add right about here is that my guy just happens to be, in many ways, the male me. Murphy's Law follows him around just as much as it follows me, which has endeared us to one another in a way that other people might find only mildly amusing.
This exit, you see, was not his first choice. No. His first choice was a few miles back and much less populated. He wondered aloud whether it was a good idea to check into a place where only one car seemed to be parked... something about the movie Hotel Hell came up... but then he saw the "VACANCY" neon sign lit up and deemed it quaint... that is, until I said, "Oh, just like in Psycho." That was all he needed to hear and he was turning his car around and driving to the next exit... which, as I've already stated, just happened to be Lake City.
Figuring "What could go wrong with Holiday Inn," probably because it was a name brand (unlike Psycho), he checked in and prepared himself for a restful night in a sleepy North Florida town. Trying not to spook him, I didn't bring up all the "sleepy town" horror movies that were popping into my head at that moment. He continued to talk to me as he opened the door to his "executive suite" and then, suddenly, he went completely silent. After a few seconds, he spoke again, but nothing above a whisper.
"Sherri, I'm in someone's apartment. I can't sleep here. This is someone's apartment!"
"What are you talking about? It's a Holiday Inn... a hotel, not an apartment," I tried to assure him, though I was thoroughly confused at that point.
"No no no no no no. THIS is an apartment. It has three rooms, but almost no furniture. This one room, it has only a coffee maker alone on a stand against one wall. And this other room has two small chairs with a window looking in on the ironing board in this other little room. I can't sleep here. This is too creepy."
I was trying not to laugh at this point, as well as not at all picturing what he was talking about, offering suggestions to make it better, but none were working. Finally, he says:
"I'm going to send you some pictures."
So he hung up with me and I waited... after about 15 minutes, the pictures started coming in, and I could not stop laughing from the very first one. Because not only did the rooms look EXACTLY as he described them, the pictures also had this eerie fog to them, due to his camera phone. By the time he called me back to exclaim, "See," I was laughing too hard to stop. Here's what I saw:
The reason I was laughing so hard, was because I was thinking about why there was so few pieces of furniture. Of course, the real reason is that it's Lake City, Florida... and to those folks on a redneck's shoestring budget, that probably looks like a classy executive suite. To me, however, it looked like it was called "the executive suite" because one time some road-weary executive stayed there and was hacked up into a million pieces while he slept. The other thing I was imagining was that there used to be much more furniture in there, but at night, some of the pieces come alive and they've been eating all the other furniture there.
I didn't say any of this to my boyfriend, because he was already freaked enough as it was. I know him well enough to know that even though the rooms looked empty in those photos above, he was imagining all kinds of scary shit hidden in there... so my mind raced to those images too. Here's my little rendition of what his fears might resemble:
I didn't share these thoughts with him until the next day, of course. He did stay all night, but he never slept... he kept the tv on and every light on in the place, but there was no way that sleep ever happened.
I love that I've now got someone else's neuroses to blog about along with my own crazy shit. I've been worried that if I ever found happiness, I would sacrifice my anxious and/or angsty blog material... but little did I know that I'd find a whole new motherload!
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