Ramblings by Jes, part 1 – Hotels

There are some things that I find interesting on our trip. You may not, but I want to capture my thoughts about them. Mostly it is the result of things not being exactly the way I pictured them when I thought about the trip. My first thoughts are on hotels…
Since there are six of us, hotel stays are not as simple as for an average family of 4. Along this trip, we’ve had 2 rooms with Dave and I each having 2 kids, we’ve had a suite with 2 beds and a sleeper couch, we’ve slept in 1 room with two kids on the floor in sleeping bags, we’ve squished into a tiny room in downtown Boston with Zack having to sleep in the path to the bathroom, and we’ve had a two-bedroom suite where we can actually spread out a little. Logistically, I tried to separate clothes into groups that would make it easier to bring in less to the hotel rooms. But, I had the bins full of things that we might need at some point – chargers for electronics, dish soap to clean the water bottles, extra Pull-ups for Matthew, extra shoes. Problem was, I needed to figure out what we needed as we pull into a hotel, usually late at night. The cheaper the hotel (i.e. Super 8, Red Roof), the easier it was for me to get back to the car to grab something I needed. But, you sacrifice quality beds and breakfast if you go with these. And, we’ve found that we wanted to be downtown in the cities. This meant that we were staying in bigger hotels and our car was usually parked a couple blocks away in the nearest lot that could hold our car with the car top carrier. Basically, the car was pretty inaccessible if we were staying downtown. Therefore, I wore the same shoes and we went without a lot of things I had worked so hard to remember to bring, such as goggles for the pools.

Since our trip is not planned out, we never book our hotel until a few hours before we intend to stay. We began using hotwire.com to get a good deal. We found that getting a hotel in the city was the best deal. When we went from Kansas City to Denver, we were going to have to pay $130 for a Super 8 at one of the Podunk towns along the interstate or pay $83 for a nice hotel in the middle of Denver. That pushed us forward to Denver, which made for a very late night. We actually have done very well on hotels, relatively. Although, I do not want to see the AMEX bill at the end of this month.

The biggest problem we have is which one of the kids sleeps where. That was causing all kinds of fights at the beginning of our trip. We’ve instituted a rotating order of choosing your spot. It’s not really popular, as it is not completely “fair”. Sometimes we have bed space for everyone and other times we only have floor space for the 2 that choose last, but it’s the best system we have. And, for me and Dave, who spent most of our childhood camping on vacations, we don’t feel too sorry for our kids having to sleep in a sleeping bag inside a warm, carpeted hotel room. While the kids don’t love the new system, they accept it and therefore it is working much better. Loving this two bedroom condo here in Vegas. Although, we had a scary moment here that would not have happened in a regular hotel room. We were awakened at 1:30 in the morning by a knock on the door. It was security with Rachel! She had apparently sleep-walked out of the condo and into the hall. Then, she woke up and couldn’t get back in. I couldn’t hear her from our room. Eventually, she got very upset and headed downstairs. She says it was the scariest time in her life. I felt so bad for her and like a horrible mom for not being able to hear her knocking. Luckily, she was fine. Tonight, we will be sleeping with some furniture blocking the door, just in case.