valeriesbookofme

 Our car trip from Sierra Vista to Tucson was uneventful. Richard was relaxed thanks to the anti-anxiety meds. Traffic was light on the I-10. As we turned onto the road leading to our hotel, which was meant to be a Holiday Inn, we were confused by the “Holiday Inn” sign having disappeared from where we knew the Holiday Inn used to be. There was a sign for another hotel, one whose name we didn’t recognize at all. We parked in front and went into the lobby. The lobby smelled dreadfully stale, the chairs looked dirty and stained. It looked like the Holiday Inn we had stayed at in the past but it also looked as if it had been left to molder. There was a line in front of the rather unkempt-looking hotel clerk. He wore a baseball cap advertising some mechanic shop and an old t-shirt. As I took my place in the line, I heard snippets of conversations from various would-be guests— ‘I’ve looked at the room, it isn’t made up.’ ‘Here’s a photo of the bug that was on the sheets.’ The clerk peer...

Back in November during the Black Friday sales, Richard and I decided to book a cruise to Alaska. This was despite the fact that we had traveled to Alaska in May of last year with Holland America with somewhat mixed results: I had twice been locked into bathroom stalls with faulty locks on the ship, necessitating an alarm call from the stall. We were allocated a cabin that seemed to be directly above the ship’s engine room; so noisy and vibrating was it that we couldn’t sleep at night. And finally, on the second to last day of the cruise, my husband tripped on the last step of a staircase on the ship and sprained his ankle. He was wheeled off the ship in a wheelchair, a mixed blessing because that meant we were allocated priority loading at the taxi rank and in the airport. It took him two months before he could walk normally.  With all that having happened, you might wonder why we chose to do another Alaska cruise this year. Well, we actually loved the cruise itself. Alaska was be...