Our adventure really began and ended with the hotel choice in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Before heading down to Tennessee for work camp, we stopped for a couple days in Kentucky so the kids could take part in Ichthus, which is a Christian music festival put on by Asbury Theological Seminary, which in itself is a part of Asbury University. The festival is held on a farm owned by the organization in the middle of the amazing green hills of Kentucky. There are livestock grazing on three sides and natural amphitheater shape to the area directly surrounding the main stage.
Aside from the total reliance on portable facilities, it is as comfortable and beautiful place to see a concert outdoors as any. The "Porta Kleen" toilet company apparently skirts any laws regarding truth in advertising by intentionally misspelling "kleen", since actual cleanliness was nowhere to be found. This is a brilliant ploy that has been used for years by advertisers. We really need to stop falling for it.
The last thing I will say about Ichthus is this... I hate it. But, we don't go there for me. One of the sacrifices a 36 year old man makes to go on a trip like this is that he must bend his will to the average 14-18 year old girls and boys who are the real important reasons for the trip. We must therefore remind ourselves that we are not on vacation as such and that we are not doing this for ourselves, necessarily. I imagine this is what parenting feels like. I wouldn't know, having chosen to sit that right of passage out.
The reason I don't like the festival is because I don't like the music, I don't like the tents that distribute material that indicates all of humanity is bound for hell, (a parade for which I am apparently the grand marshal based on one or two things I read), and I don't like some of the sanctimony. Yeah, dude... I smell the weed emanating from your tent. You're high and your girlfriend had JBF hair... praise Jesus!
At least the food was good this year. Really, really good. I would go back for the gyros alone. It was impressively good and only modestly overpriced. Kudos to the food vendors.
Let's take I275 back to the topic, shall we? The hotel we stayed in was a Howard Johnson's. Howard hasn't been there in awhile to inspect, I presume. Or perhaps his lifeless body was the source of the foul odor in the west stairwell. I am so glad it didn't have a pool, because I am pretty sure it wouldn't have looked or smelled to good if it did. It's hard to keep a bunch of teenagers out of a pool. God bless them they seem to look right past all the botulism and bird corpses and only see fun.
It was taking a long time to check in, so after a little while, I decided to go in and see how things were going. Our youth leader is sometimes a little too Christian and I have a tendency fulfill the strong arm of the group role. I walked in and almost died at the smell of cigarette smoke. My allergies immediately flared. In fact, I wondered aloud how it is that I ever smoked.
Sami, our leader smiled in a way that let me know everything was fine and I didn't need to pull out the Sergeant Slaughter routine. I smiled back indicating I would be the judge of that.
I heard the tail end of the conversation of Carmen, the manager...
"I can give you another room, but the lock stopped working and you have to lock it from the inside when you leave. You can leave the window unlocked though, and get in that way. That's what the last people did."
Sure, let's put our minors in there... the ones that I am indemnified to take care of.
"Gee, Carmen... that's swell, but we'll stick to the rooms with working locks" I said, a little testy.
"I just wish he didn't give out all your rooms earlier... I told him you was coming," she finished with her raspy smoke riddled voice; her laugh pushed out amid the rowels in her lungs.
"What does that mean?", I asked now, looking at Sami whose all-okay smile was starting to seem disingenuous.
"It's all set, Bill, I'll explain when we get to the parking lot," said Sami in her voice that she only uses for me and only then as a warning that she will kill me if I keep pursuing this behavior. She's a good mom, even if she is younger than I am.
Long story short, many of the rooms had fewer beds than they were supposed to, but we got an extra room for free to compensate; and of course there was always the window room without a working lock should the straits become dire.
Fine. We have rules that disallow a chaperone and a student from being alone together for extended lengths, regardless of gender. I was going to say regardless of sex there, but that could have been taken wrong. Since we had an odd amount of male leaders, all the boys were to be in their own rooms and the leaders in our own room. Clearly the system, while all well-intentioned, does not take into account the horror that could be three rooms of unsupervised boys in a very scary HoJo in a strange town in Kentucky.
So, off we trudged to our room. Josh slipped the key into the lock and opened the door. About nine inches. Before the safety bar caught and stopped the door from opening further.
"There must be someone in there," I said now, jumping to the fore and pushing and peering.
After a couple half-baked attempts to fix the situation, I got Carmen who in addition to being the manager, is also a housekeeper.
"Carmen," I said wiggling my way past the maid cart parked in the middle of the hall, "the safety bar in our room is somehow engaged and we can't get in."
"Again?!", came the reply. My first thought was, what the hell do you mean, again? In didn't think it was possible the first time, let along multiple times. It must be like, a trillion to one. She should be playing the lotto, not cleaning rooms.
"Well, I hope there's no one in there!" she said. Me too, thought I, though somehow I managed to catch the word before they issued forth from my face. "I'll go get my doohickey", Carmen finished, a little put out I thought, considering I was the one who drove 8 hours to be in this place right now.
The doohickey turned out to be a don't-hickey since it did nothing. The man next door came out of his room. He was a tattooed shaved-headed guy with almost enough teeth to count on one hand. I thought, great, we have disturbed this man's porno shoot and he will want us to pay for the ruined film.
Instead, he was the hotel maintenance man. He and his family lived there. His wife was the "head housekeeper". Apparently you can't be the manager and the head housekeeper. turns out Carmen and her husband (you guessed it, the Night Manager) live there, too. I wonder what staff meetings are like... "your place or mine?"
Anyway, he had no luck with the doohickey either. Meanwhile, my frayed nerves were beginning to cross and short-circuit.
"I have a van full of tools," I declared, remembering that I drove a van full of tools and it was in the parking lot as we were living through this ordeal, "I am going to get into this room within the next two minutes whether I have to break this door down or not. So, y'all (I was in the south after all), keep playing with your little toy. I am going to get some tools."
I came back with a chisel, a hammer and channel locks. I got permission by waving my hammer in Carmen's face in a vaguely (or not) threatening way. I noticed that Mr. Meth Mouth had exited stage left.
"Do whatcha gotta do," said Carmen.
In less than one second, I was swinging the door open, the offending safety bar lodged in my channel locks. I never even got to use the hammer. Bummer.
And into my room, replete with... one bed. This was starting to feel like a Mexican soap opera, or a bad knock-off of those road trip adventure movies. At least it had a hot tub. We couldn't use it because "The people downstairs be awful upset if you did." No further explanation was requested or offered.
Josh set up his cot, since he was the junior man and Steve and I staked out sides of the bed. It was a king, so sharing wasn't a big deal.
Sure, the comforter was no comfort unless you find stains and cigarette burns of comfort; and for a non-smoking room, it sure did smell like smoke. We figured Mr. Meth Mouth Maintenance Man was chaining in the room next door. It was palpable.
This is the shortest version of the story. There is still the story of the denizens of this ship of the damned as I began to refer to it. There is the story of the girls who awoke to much explosive vomiting outside their window at three a.m. and the old man who claimed to be an author of many books and told each and every person in the place the only joke he apparently knew.
But that is all for another day when I haven't already written for 45 minutes. I have to go... someone needs to pay the bills around here.
No comments:
Post a Comment