Fighting for the Couch, and for Hotel Discount Coupons

I grew up in the heart of the United States, aka: the middle.  It seemed to be a twenty-four hour drive to anywhere that my family ever wanted to visit.  We’d pack up the van with four kids, a cooler full of soggy sandwiches and carrot sticks, and enough books to fill a small library, and we would leave Minnesota heading every direction but north. 

It was a twenty-four hour drive to Norfolk, Virginia where my mom’s parents lived, or to Atlanta, Georgia where her sister lived. It was a twenty-four hour drive to Seattle, Washington where my dad’s parents lived, and to Mesa, Arizona where all of his four brothers lived.  And four times a year that van was packed up, and six people and their luggage were crammed into a seven person van.

My sister and I still can’t decide if the worst year was the year Mom was pregnant on the way to Arizona, or the year with a screaming new born on the way to Washington.  But even if we can’t agree on the worst year, we can definitely agree on the worst part of every trip: the hotel.  After fourteen hours of kids screaming that we needed to pull over at the next gas station or they’d wet their pants, my parents always gave in against their promise to not stop for the night.

That was before hotel discount coupons, and my family had to do what they did every road trip before: get one room for all of us.  We didn’t know that hotel discount coupons would come along someday and make future road trips unbearably awesome, we only knew that my parents would find the crappiest, cheapest hotel they could find, and smuggle us all in.

It was a tear-filled wrestling match between my sisters and brother to decide who got the loveseat couch, and a fit was thrown every time my parents announced that they got the bed and the smallest child could sleep with them.

So two children were left on the hair-covered, probably rat-infested floor with the cockroaches.  If only we’d had hotel discount coupons, we could have sprung for one of those pricey rooms with two beds.

Recently some of my college roommates and I went on a cross-country road trip.  We planned on staying with friends, and driving long nights, and never needing to rent out a hotel room. But I knew better. I’d heard promises of driving through the night before, and I also knew not to believe such promises.  Long before we left I started collecting hotel discount coupons, and those hotel discount coupons may have saved us all from hygienic nightmares.

We could actually get rooms that didn’t seem scary, smell weird, or have little critters in the corners. We didn’t have to arm wrestle or lose a fistful of hair to a younger sister.  But the best thing about hotel discount coupons is that we each got a bed, our own, clean bed to sleep in for the night.

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