I just got home from the worst vacation I’ve ever been on. I might be high-strung about literally everything else, but vacations? It takes very little to make me happy.
Like: am I at work? No? What a great vacation!
This, though. Man.
I think I was suffering a particularly cruel bout of nostalgia-sickness when I booked the room in Myrtle Beach. There are photos of my extended family in a shared resort suite, photos of my family in a resort with its own bowling alley, and photos of my family on the beach just before I knocked my brother over and ran away giggling. In sum: there are photos. What I failed to take into consideration was that these photos were taken in the 90s, and maybe, perhaps, things were different then, and — maybe, perhaps — I was a child with a child’s idea of fun. In other words, I was viewing Hotels.com through a 5-year-old’s plastic rose-tinted glasses.
I should’ve seen the cost of the room as a bad omen and not the blip of serendipity I believed it was at the time.
After I’d checked in to a second, less horrifying hotel and had a night to sleep away the anxiety and disappointment I’d been stewing in, I spent a lot of money on sweet potato pancakes and used books.* Then I went home.
I want my money back.
The moral of the story: I’m not a person who likes boardwalks or tourist traps or Wings stores on every street corner, but I am very much a person who needs to close the mental photo album and take a deep breath before giving a website my card number.
* This was a night’s sleep disturbed periodically by karaoke happening in the bar directly beneath my room. The host played “Another One Bites the Dust” after every performer, which was funny enough to cancel out the annoyance.