escape from motel 6

Two bears and a fairy up on Piute Mountain, WHAT an unexpected treat! The bears gave us a professional display of how to run away without seeming scared. The wonderful gliding fairy in a gosammer dress and a black baseball cap floated around the Twin oaks General Store and disappeared. Twin Oaks, as Nikhil (Dr. Singer's grad student) warned us yesterday, had been quite CREEPY on our last visit. This time there was nothing creepy at all, just blank incredulity at our plan to drive up the mountain.

What WAS creepy was the following night at Motel 6 Tulare. As I parked the car a fellow driving around in circles looked at Mike oddly and gave him a lopsided creepy grin. He thought no more of it. That morning, I found that the door jamb of my room (Room 217) was sticky. I had to push hard to open the door. Funny, it hadn’t been like that last night when we checked in. But I thought no more of it. Then we went to the front desk to buy a scratch’n’sniff card for the wi-fibecause that’s how wi-fi works at Motel 6. A resigned-looking guest was complaining that someone had broken his car window in the night and stolen what they could find. He also remarked that, as he arrived, a man had been looking at him in an odd way. HEY, Mike said, there was a fellow looking oddly at ME when I arrived about the same time. He studied him for a minute and said

“That was ME, I’m sorry, I was very tired.”

So back we went to our rooms and discovered why the door of 217 was sticking. Someone had driven a VEHICLE into 113, immediately below, at 2:15 in the morning, and had broken the main stud supporting the upper floor. The manager appeared.

“Are you in 217?”

“Yes”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to move, it’s about to collapse.”

“Er, that’s OK, we’re leaving. Did you discover what happened?”

“YES I DID, the idiots drove away but came back and rented another room at the other side of the motel. I found the car all broken up, and photographed them walking to it and driving away.”

“Did you get the plate number?”

“Didn’t have a plate, it was a brand new car, but it had a paper sticker and I got that number on the photo.”

Hmm. You’d think that they’d either admit what they’d done or disappear completely! What odd behavior! There’s nowt so queer as folk, as they say in Yorkshire.

(travelogue courtesy of Michael Singer)