A lesson learned about spring vacations, hopefully, or how we survived a night in Laurel, Mississippi

A column by John Estridge

My Long Suffering Wife Ruth said they looked like blood stains, and I could not disagree. I checked the walls for hash marks to tell how many bodies they had found there, but the light was too dim and the grime on the walls too thick to really get a good look at the walls’ surface.

Let me back up just a little bit. Ruth and I left Indiana on Friday, March 20, on a vacation. Our first stop was Laurel, Mississippi.

For those who do not watch HGTV, I will explain why we wanted to go to Laurel, Mississippi. Erin and Ben Napier, Laurel, Mississippi residents, host the show Home Town on HGTV. They go around their home town, Laurel, Mississippi, and rehab homes. They often show images, film clips, from their home town of Laurel’s downtown, and it looks nice. It is a very entertaining show at least to these two old people – well I am old, and Ruth is not.

We had planned the trip for several months finding late in March as a time that worked for both of us in scheduling jobs and that sort of thing. I do not like to make reservations because our plans usually change when we are on vacation, and we have been known to suddenly go to somewhere else on a whim.

I asked Ruth how busy can Laurel, Mississippi, be on a Friday night in March?

Ruth reminded me often on the trip that I say many stupid things during our conversations, and that one turned out to be a real doozy.

Initially, we had planned to make it a two-day trip to Laurel. On our past trips, I cannot wake up early and function so our time of departure was usually late morning or early afternoon, cutting down on travel time.

But, I am old. Seemingly, with every day I age more, my sleep cycle gets shorter, and I am condemned to have insomnia often. That was the case Thursday night prior to leaving Friday. I could not sleep. I think it was the excitement as I am like a little kid when planning to go on a vacation.

I gave up on sleep about 3:30 a.m., having tossed and turned for a couple of hours prior to that and waited downstairs for Ruth to wake up. It has been a 180 with us in that regard. She got up around 7, and we left before 8. I went to Mississippi via I-65 and Louisville instead of going through Cincinnati to Louisville. Cincinnati, while seemingly out of the way, is actually faster because of interstate travel compared to all of the state roads one has to take to get to I-65 around Seymour. However, Cincy was in rush hour, and I don’t do rush hours.

We made excellent time, and we both decided to do the trip in one day so we could see Laurel on a Saturday instead of Sunday as we had read many of the shops are not open on Sunday and others have limited hours.

As in most things, Ruth is much better with her Smart Phone than I am. A couple of hours northeast of Laurel, Ruth voiced the first warning about what was ahead. She had not been able to find any vacancies. I downplayed it as I had viewed the number of motels in Laurel, it is off I-59, which goes to New Orleans. There are several Laurel exits.

However, when we got to Laurel about 5 p.m. Central time, the first, and then the second and then the third motel, all said they were full. I asked at the third motel why there were so many people, and the lady at the desk said she did not have a clue, but they had been full all week. We looked and we looked. We finally found a Super 8.

When I went in the office, the lady behind the counter was very nice. She said she had one room left. I took it unseen.

Oh my.

She told me we did not have a refrigerator so she gave us a discount. The bill was $61 instead of $66.

It was on the third floor with an exterior entrance. Ruth and I talked about the last time we were in a motel where we had to walk up three flights of stairs to an exterior entrance. We could not remember the last time. Ruth is afraid of heights, well we both are, but Ruth’s is more acute. She did not like the open space between the steps as we went up the three floors of stairs. She almost froze on the stairway several times. In the parking lot, Ruth said we were going to take up the bare necessities because of the three-floor climb.

Next door to ours came the aroma of something I have not smelled since the late 1970s, marijuana, seemingly clouds of marijuana smoke. Ruth, a little too loudly, asked me if that was pot, and I nodded my head yes while putting my finger to my lips. Either she did not get it or did not care as she continued to talk about being next door to potheads. The walls and doors were like cardboard, which probably only amplified the sound.

On our way to the room, there seemed to be females of the oldest occupation accompanied by their “handlers” and/or “customers” going in and out of some of the rooms.

Our room’s interior was almost beyond description. Huge stains covered the mid-18th Century carpeting. Those were the ones Ruth said were blood stains. Again, I could not argue the point. We had no toilet paper, and we had one washcloth and no towels. Ruth checked the room for bedbugs and found none.

While I did stop back at the office to get toilet paper and towels, the nice lady seemed horror struck and asked me if the room had been cleaned. I just didn’t answer because I did not know the context of the question: whether she was talking about that day, week, month, century or the lifetime of the motel.

We drove to downtown Laurel and found a nice Italian restaurant. On the way to the restaurant, I passed two more fairly large motels. They were also full. And the ladies at the desks at both places said they did not have a clue why there were so many people in town.

Forced to go back to our room, I wedged a chair under the door knob and wedged another chair against the first chair. I was not armed. We kept our clothes on, including socks and shoes, and stayed on top of the covers. We ventured into the restroom as rarely as possible.

I kept all the lights on and the TV on. In the early morning, we changed clothes while sitting on top of the covers, never letting our feet touch the floor.

After returning to the room, I called ahead to our next destination, the Gulf Coast, using a number Ruth found on her phone. The lady I talked to was very, very nice. Ruth saw vacancies at the Harrah Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, so that is the first place I asked the lady to look. We wanted a king bed for two nights. The lady said the two-night bill would be $1,200. It took awhile for me to speak again to tell her that was just a tad out of our price range. I told the lady we could be inland from the coast. It did not matter. We just wanted a clean motel in a better neighborhood. She told me every time she found a vacancy at a motel, it would disappear before she could do anything. She said she had never encountered that before. Finally, she found a room at a Hampton Inn near the Pensacola Airport.

We took it.

At 6 a.m., after spending all night awake – remember this is the second night without sleep for me — we went to put the few things we took with us to the room back in the car’s trunk. An adjacent building to our right of the parking lot as we were facing the trunk was missing half of its roof. Insulation hung down from the roof’s remnants. There was a housing area behind the parking lot. Again, it was 6 a.m., on a Saturday morning. A younger person, early 20s maybe, walked from the housing area – there were no businesses there — to our right between us and the disabled building and across the parking lot. Like an idiot I made eye contact and being from Indiana, I nodded in greeting. He just gave me a dead-eye stare in return. The three of us were alone in the parking lot. I wondered at the time and now our close he was to shooting us.

He walked to a first-floor room, knocked on the door and while turned to stare at Ruth and I, the door was opened behind him. He went into the room. Now, it could have been all innocent, but I was thinking a heroin transaction.

We could not get away from that motel fast enough. After a Waffle House breakfast, Ruth’s first experience with Waffle House – it was nearby — we drove around Laurel for the next three hours. We probably went on every street in the town. It is about the size of Richmond with the look of Connersville.

We did not care for the Hampton Inn at Pensacola. None of the employees were friendly. In fact, they were surly to a person. Being from Indiana, I said hello to each and every employee and each guest I passed at the motel. The employees, to a person, did not respond except with glares. The guests were much friendlier in their responses. However, the younger, college-age guests, and there were many — seemed shocked any stranger, especially an old, bald, once fat guy, would give them a nice greeting.

At the end of our sojourn through the south, we stopped in Franklin, Tennessee, staying at a Holiday Inn Express and actually had a very pleasant stay. We plan to go back there and see more of downtown Franklin. And stay once again at the Holiday Inn Express.

One thing we did learn was to never plan another vacation in the south during the time of spring break.

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