1. The Bad News
Her face went blank. Something was not right.
The fair and industrious Trudy was on her cell phone with the Sea Aire [link] in Cocoa Beach letting them know that we were two hours away. She wanted to ask them if they’d still be in the office when we arrived.
She closed her phone and looked over at me.
“The woman was confused,” Trudy said. “She was looking for the paperwork and said they’ll call back.”
We drove along under gray skies in the rain, and eventually her cell phone rang.
“Hi Gary,” Trudy said and listened for a while in silence.
“Well I don’t know what to say, Gary,” she said. “I have an email from you that I printed out before we left. It says that you made our reservation for today.”
2. What Happened
So it turns out that somehow Gary wrote down our reservation a day early in the motel calendar, even though he confirmed the correct day with us in email. And on that day we were driving down Interstate 10 somewhere between Houston and Tallahassee.
He said that he tried to reach us on the phone. He said that he called and he called and no one answered, which was of course because we were hundreds of miles away, speeding along the highway.
And when he failed to reach us, he cancelled the first day of our reservation and gave it to someone else. There was no room for us that night, and there were no available hotel or motel rooms anywhere in that part of Florida, because everyone was coming to watch the Atlantis launch.
As Trudy said, “I don’t know what to say,” because we certainly didn’t have the faintest idea what we’d do when we arrived.
3. How Gary Fixed It
Gary told Trudy that he’d find a place for us by the time we arrived. He told her that on the phone as we passed Daytona Beach still driving under gray skies and rain.
When we pulled into the motel parking lot and stepped across the puddles to get to the office, we found him there with a nervous smile on his face. He welcomed us and shook our hands, and he explained his proposal.
“I’ll sleep upstairs tonite,” he said. “You can have my apartment for the night. Is that ok with you?”
Our eyes widened. We smiled and nodded and said yes. And the nervous look on his face melted away.
So he took us to see his apartment in the motel. The floor had just been mopped, and there were clean sheets on the guest bed.
“The refrigerator’s a mess,” he said, and he gave us his key.
In less than an hour, we were fast asleep.