Iron Mountain Part One---From Heaven to Hell

         When we arrived in Iron Mountain, we were taken back by it’s natural beauty and historic charm. Just to get here, we had to drive past crystal clear mountain streams, ice cold natural springs, picturesque waterfalls, and that’s just the roadside parks! Every neighborhood has it’s own little playground park and baseball field, each one as clean and well-kept as the next. Quaint little “pasty shops” adorn nearly every street corner. The vibrant colors of the changing leaves of fall were icing on the cake. We had left Louisiana right at the peak of a drought-related heat wave, with temperatures soaring to well in the hundreds. But here in Heaven, um err, Iron Mountain, the breeze flowed at a perfect 65 degrees.
         When we checked into our hotel, our visit seemed to just keep getting better and better. The room was enormous, clean, and pretty. The blankets were soft, the beds were two queens instead of the usual doubles. The rooms were all equipped with little 21” TVs with built-in VCRs, and in the lobby was a free video rental place with plenty of variety. We thought “oh, how quaint! It’s like we’ve traveled back in time to a simpler better era!” Housekeeping insisted on cleaning our room every day, claiming that the extremely hard water made it necessary, but the ladies were great company. They apologized for the intrusion, and when we assured them that their visit was the highlight of our day, they apologized even more! I was deeply impressed by the hospitality of these “non-Southerners.” And of course, I was even more delighted with their incomprehensible accent. They adored my “tree girls” and said to my son “geeze, what a cute matchbox car you’ve got!”, causing him to roll with laughter and start saying “geeze” a few hundred times a day ad nauseam.
We had been hit pretty hard financially on the way up here, in part because of my husband’s “great luck” in winning an auction on e-Bay for a cargo van which we had to pick up in Missouri on our way here, and in part because our regular van broke down in Arkansas, and we had to shell out several hundred dollars on that unexpected expense. If driving with a family of six from Louisiana to Michigan is expensive, try driving that same distance in two separate vehicles. Needless to say, we were cash-poor during that first week while awaiting that first paycheck.
         Luckily, there was a Little Caesar’s Pizza right next door to our hotel, and they sell large one-topping pizzas for five bucks at their drive-thru window. The housekeepers commented on our growing mountain of pizza boxes, and I explained that it seemed the cheapest way to feed a family of six on a tight budget. They inquired whether our company didn’t reimburse our travel expenses to get up here, and we just smiled and explained that the first paycheck pays for our trip up here, the last one pays for our trip home, and since this is just a five week job, the three checks in the middle are all we get to take home. These housekeepers were so friendly, so talkative with us. I thought I had made new friends.
         Our hotel stay mysteriously took a turn exactly one week after checking in. And what a 180 turn it was! I will relate the events of that fateful day, and let the reader decide whether any of the events are related. I insist that they can’t be! My husband fears it is a case of cause and effect.
           On the night of payday, Wal-Mart marked down all of their big screen TV’s that had been on display to about half price, some even less. They even had one TV that had never been opened marked down to half price, because someone had bought it and returned it the next day, box unopened, with the complaint that it was “too big.” Naturally, all the boys on my husband’s work crew stood around gawking at these TV’s during their break. They all started comparing them, and then one guy said “this one is mine” and the next guy said “not if I buy it first” and it quickly became a game. The boys all figured out who among them was going to buy each TV, and my husband played along with the rest of them. Then the boss brings out the paychecks, and the peer pressure thickens. The first guy goes and grabs his TV, and (I’m sure you can see this coming!) the rest of the guys follow suit! Even my husband! Yes, my husband Julio! Julio, who is always so frugal! This is the guy who orders only two plates when he takes his family of six to a restaurant, orders water for everyone, and asks for extra plates so we can divvy up the food. This is the guy who buys a twenty piece chicken nuggets at McDonald’s and makes all the kids share one drink, because after all, refills are free! This is the guy who encourages me to make homemade laundry detergent so we can save money. He buys the cheapest paper plates, then wants us to reuse them as much as possible. I swear, if he thought he could talk us into reusing toilet paper, he’d give it a shot! He wears the title “Tight Wad” with honor. He has literally made me return things to the store when he thought he could possibly find a better deal elsewhere! This is the guy who has to stop by the Post Office on his way to Lowe’s because there is a ten percent off coupon in the change of address packet. And this is the guy who caves to peer pressure and buys a 55 inch Samsung LED Smart TV. Did I mention that we don’t have satellite at home, not only due to his penny-pinching antics, but also due to our (ok, mostly my) convictions? I mean, seriously, what is he going to watch on this TV? You can only watch Inception and Andrea Bocelli in concert so many times, even on blu-ray, before even they get old.
         So here my husband shows up from work on payday with a really big TV, and guess what?--hardly anything left over! Ach! Another week of one-topping cheap pizzas!
        Enter the housekeepers. “oh, you guys got one of those too? It looks like everyone with your company got one. Your company must pay really well.” Last words I ever heard from my “new friends.”
        That night, while my husband is away at work, the hotel manager pays me a visit and says that we are being “too loud” and that I need to put my children to sleep because we are bothering other guests. I was bewildered. My children were busy working away at home schooling! They had not made a peep all night! The little ones were crawling around on the floor pushing their baby dolls inside of my shoes like they were cars. I thought, hmm, it must be the light bumping of the babies’ knees on the floor that is disturbing someone. Maybe the occasional trip to the bathroom was the culprit, what with footsteps and flushing and all. Nevertheless, I closed their math books, turned off the lights, and obliged the manager by putting us all to bed, regardless of the fact that this would mean we’d all be wide awake the next day while my husband tried to sleep.
        The housekeepers come again the next day, but this time they ask us to leave the room for them to clean. I assumed they must have gotten in trouble for taking so long cleaning our room, since they usually chatted up a storm with me and the kids. I obligingly took the kids out to the parking lot and we sat in the van. Nobody even flagged us to let us know they were done. We just sat and sat and sat out there in the cold.
        The next night, the manager appeared at our door to complain yet again! Noisy? My children? Where have I been while my kids are making all this racquet? I certainly haven’t heard any of it! This time she spoke rather harshly to me, prefixing it all with “I don’t mean to sound crappy, but…” and then I completely lost the rest of what she said. Suddenly, her Upper Peninsula accent was less charming and more nasal. Kimberly asked me “When she says she doesn’t mean to sound crappy, is she telling the truth?” I didn’t know what to say, except that maybe she always sounds crappy and just can’t help it.
The next day, we were ordered to change rooms. At the drop of a hat, we had to pack all of our things, and lug them downstairs to a smelly room in disrepair at the end of the hall. Luckily, that big TV weighs no more than a feather. Still, it was a tough task to maneuver it around the corners. I couldn’t understand why we were being forced to change rooms, but I only smiled and obliged.
Every day now, we are forced out of our room into the cold parking lot for half an hour or more, so the housekeepers can clean our room. Except that, they don’t make the beds, they don’t take out the trash, and they rarely leave us any fresh towels. I’m not sure what it is that they are doing in there, but it sure isn’t cleaning. Worst of all, it is never at the same time two days in a row. They might wake us up in the middle of the day, or they might run us off in the middle of the night. We never know. Nothing has gone missing, so we can’t really complain. Still, I feel hurt and confused by the strange behavior of the formerly friendly housekeepers. I have actually cried over it. It doesn’t make any sense!
         My husband says it’s simple. They saw the TV, became enraged with jealousy, and hate us for having it. I told him nobody could be that shallow. After all, I see other people with nice things all the time, and I don’t hate them for it. I’m not jealous. I don’t even think about it. Sure, I realize that I am not the norm. Chloe, my two year old, has a very hard time understanding why she has to get into our old van, when there is a beautiful Jaguar parked right next to us, and she can reach its handles. She tells me every single trip that we take anywhere “I want to ride in THAT car!” At least my baby has good taste. Except that she also wants to ride every motorcycle she sees. “Mommy, I want that motorcycle! I want to RIDE it!!!” Every motorcycle. Every time. I seriously hope this isn’t some foreshadowing of things to come. But back to the housekeepers, I insist that they are not two years old, and thus cannot be acting out of some jealousy.
Yet only a couple days ago, the hateful manager informed me “We haven’t even been able to rent your last room out, because it was so filthy! It was covered in crumbs and sticky stuff. They are still trying to clean it!” Lies! Lies, I tell you! This is not the first hotel we have stayed at. I am a very well-seasoned traveling mommy. My children are never allowed anything sticky at all in a hotel room. They have no candy, even my oldest drink out of sippy cups to avoid any messes! For that matter, even my husband and I have “sippy cups”, or thermos bottles, that we drink out of, to ensure we NEVER leave a mess! We bring our own linens, so that if any food does get spilled, we are able to wash it, and it not dirty up the hotel’s linens. The children do not EVER have snacks or anything that might make crumbs in the room! In all the years we have been traveling with this job, and all the dozens of hotels we have stayed at, we have NEVER had a complaint of noise or mess! Not only is this the first, but it is a lie! I cannot fathom it at all.