Hotel and Motels, Chapter 4

The first Missouri B&B had once been a school house. Not a one-room country school but a two storied multi-room building. I had decided it would be romantic to take my wife to this quaint B&B for her birthday. You know, get her out of the house, do something different, and have a romantic evening. 

Immediately after checking in I noticed that the room had once been a class room with high ceilings and extremely tall windows. The windows were uncovered; that is, they had neither blinds nor curtains. There we looked at the bare naked windows and decided we would have to get undressed for bed in the dark, which we did.

Since there was so little privacy, romance was out of the question, along with getting up in the morning to get to the bathroom without finding a robe or something, which we had not brought along. Once again we slept on a bed of nails, or concrete. Once again we tossed all night pulling the covers off of each other.

Once again we went to breakfast and had the same experience we had in New Mexico. And, once again, the cost of this night of torture hit hard in the wallet or credit card (I cannot remember which).

You would have thought that I had learned my lesson.

While B&Bs are charming little places, they are generally too quaint and very uncomfortable. Nonetheless, I engaged a third one of these places and took my wife there for another romantic weekend.

This one was a Queen Ann Mansion. Missouri has many of these structures. Some are antebellum, but most have been constructed in the post-bellum period (I have made that word up, I think). From the outside the place an exterior inviting charm and it had a wonderful quaint name; for the life of me I cannot remember it. We had no idea of the nightmare that awaited us inside.

We found the interior still being remodeled. To get to the bathroom across the hall from our room we had to traipse through unfinished flooring and work tools. As I recall, the bathroom also remained unfinished and needed more remodeling. The room we had (it was the only room available) did have a charm and comfort to it that reflected Victorian charm. Now to me anything Victorian is not charming but I will grant it is interesting.

In this B&B, fortunately, the spacious bed had a modern and comfortable mattress.

Again, Breakfast (recall that is the second B) left me gagging. There is no need to go into the menu being offered but only to report the cook needed more training. And, again the mother of the house cooked as she rushed children off to school.

The moral of this story is, stay away from bed and breakfast places. They look nice, and lure you in with an old fashioned ambience, but remember if that old fashioned stuff had been any good we would still be living in it.