Postcard from Yuma
I've been off traveling this last week. My brother and I have accompanied my mom on her annual driving trip back to visit her family in Texas. This includes stops in Plano to see her father and brother Mark, and San Antonio to see her brother Alan. This year, my brother Keith drove back to Texas with her, then I flew in to Dallas to accompany them on the journey home. For the first time this year, we spent the night in Austin in between brothers, and omega697 and aardvark428 were nice enough to spend the evening entertaining us and showing us around a little.
Anyway, I love road trips, and have been having a good time (even though we couldn't go to a really neat Desert Museum in Tucson today due to bad weather). Instead, we headed down the road to Yuma, where we are staying in a Best Western in what must have been an ultra-swank luxury suite back in the late 60's. It's really big... it has it's own den (with a pullout couch-bed), a bed/dining room with a fold-out Murphy Bed, a full kitchen, and a bathroom down at the end of a long, curved hall. But what really makes the place cool is the strange mix of modern conveniences and what would have been luxury 30 years ago. These include:
Anyway, tomorrow we head home, and Monday I get back to work.
Anyway, I love road trips, and have been having a good time (even though we couldn't go to a really neat Desert Museum in Tucson today due to bad weather). Instead, we headed down the road to Yuma, where we are staying in a Best Western in what must have been an ultra-swank luxury suite back in the late 60's. It's really big... it has it's own den (with a pullout couch-bed), a bed/dining room with a fold-out Murphy Bed, a full kitchen, and a bathroom down at the end of a long, curved hall. But what really makes the place cool is the strange mix of modern conveniences and what would have been luxury 30 years ago. These include:
- Hi-speed internet
- Microwave oven
- A Yorx-brand home stereo, complete with turn-table and fine layer of dust (and wouldn't you know it, I left all my John Denver LPs at home!)
- A speed control knob (this control can be seen on the wall behind the stereo... we have no idea what it's supposed to do)
- Two televisions and a DVD player
- Lots of wood paneling, and that dim, 1970's quality of lighting that comes with it
- A really fake fireplace (note power chord) that consists of plastic logs with a lightbulb inside, and which emits an eerie glow
- A really old safe which is hidden behind a painting (behind the adjacent painting is a really old electrical panel, with lots of on/off switches which we aren't brave enough to start flipping)
- A funky old wall-mounted hair-dryer, which consists of a box with a tube coming out of it. The business end of the tube is held to the box with a magnet, and when you remove this end, hot air comes out. The thing has no buttons, switches, or controls of any sort.
- A jacuzzi tub, which looks relatively new, but whose controls have a very distinctive 70's styling
- That funky, dusky, old hotel smell
Anyway, tomorrow we head home, and Monday I get back to work.