Hotel Adventures

We finally made it back from NY on what was supposed to be a 4 day trip but turned into a 7 day trip. My mother and I drove straight through from Mississippi (where we spent Thanksgiving weekend) to New York. It was a 20 hour drive and my mother drove about 1 hour of it. L We did pull over a couple of times at well-lit and police-monitored rest areas, to nap a little. Overall the drive was non-eventful. The goal was to get to the hotel in the early afternoon and get a long nap, then get up and have dinner and get a good night’s sleep.

The first part of this went fine. We got to the Super 8 in Nyack, New York, at 2:00, just in time for check-in. We slept for about 5 hours and then ordered pizza. The problem came when we went back to bed. At about 2:30 a loud alarm started going off – three loud beeps, then a pause, then more beeps. Just as my mother was about to call the front desk, our phone rang. The man downstairs, whose accent was very difficult to understand, said that there was no emergency, and that there was “air in our system.” We had no idea what that meant, but more was coming. He then told her, “Go into the bathroom and put a towel under the door.” I could hear her repeating this, and it made no more sense to me than it did to her. She asked, “Are you saying we should get in the bathroom?” He told her again, “Just go into the bathroom and put a towel under the door, and then come back to the phone.”So I listened as she got a towel, shut the bathroom door, and then put the towel under. Then she went back to the phone, but the man had hung up.

We sat on the bed wondering what was going on. Was the air in the system seeping out of our bathroom, poisoning us? “Well, I’m sure not going to sleep now,” my mother said.Just then there was a knock at our door and a man’s voice called, “Is everything okay?”My mom yelled back, confused, “The alarm’s not coming from in here.”Now it was getting a little bit scary. We had air in the system, the bathroom closed off for some reason, and other hotel guests thought the problem was with us.

So my mother called back down. “No, the problem is in 116,” he told her, not 216, which was our room. So she went outside to see if the man in the hall knew any more than we did, and he said that the man at the front desk had definitely said 216.

More sitting and waiting…about this time, when our reasoning skills had kicked in, we came to a couple of realizations. First of all, it dawned on us that “air in our system” must have been “an alarm system.” And then it hit me all of a sudden. “Do you think he meant get a towel from the bathroom and put it under the door to the room?” That seemed to make a lot more sense, and yet we wondered why he had phrased it the way he had, and why he had even bothered to mention the “Go into the bathroom” part. Where else would we get a towel? So, feeling a bit like Amelia Bedelia calling the roll, we moved the towel to what we hoped was its proper place.

Finally the alarm stopped…but then it started back up. We looked outside and could see police and fire trucks. Then it stopped again…and started up again. When it finally stopped for good, my mother called again to find out what exactly had happened. Apparently the person in 116 had “accidentally” pulled the fire alarm, but there had not been any fire.

It seemed odd to us that if they had enough suspicion to tell us to put a towel under the door for smoke, that that might have been the point that evacuation would have been wise. We wondered if this was standard protocol, the towel under the door thing.Besides a power outage a day later, which at least we could sleep through, the rest of our hotel adventures were pretty mild.