The Hillbilly Viking

Unfortunately, the weather has not been as predictable on this trip as we would have liked, so plans are always in flux. Before getting here, we read that the Azores is a place you can experience all four seasons in one day. Big deal. Muncie, Indiana makes the same claim. Frankly, every shit-show north of Atlanta does too, so we took it with a grain of salt. However, in the relatively short time we’ve been here, we’ve experienced sun, torrential rains, one entire day of constant 50 mph winds, and even a freak hail storm with accumulation.

We just need to check off volcanic eruption (surprisingly possible) and plague of locusts (it is predominantly Catholic), and I’ll be able to mark the last two spots on my card and yell, “Bingo!”

Muncie this ain’t.

Needless to say, we’re getting to know our hotel a lot better than I expected, but that’s OK. The Lince is a nice 4-star, perched midway up a hill overlooking the ever-changing Atlantic and the sleepy town below. It has room service, a funky, Hugh Heffner-ish indoor pool, and a desk clerk who looks suspiciously like Jennifer Garner. We’ve sheltered in worse places. Utica, Michigan, for instance.

We’ve fallen into a routine where we start off each day by hiking up the steep grade behind the hotel until our calves start screaming and then circle back down to the town below to visit the farmácia for more Advil. (Incidentally, ‘screaming calves’ is the exact opposite of ‘happy cows.’) During this daily hike, we take stock of the prevailing winds and plan the rest of our day. Weather apps are about useless here in the middle of the Atlantic where floating, doppler radar stations aren’t really a thing, so the old WKRP, Les Nessman, eyewitness weather tactic is about the next best option.

This morning, the cold, wind-driven rain made the hike impossible. Even the pornographically pregnant cat that likes to waddle along behind us found better things to do (lamaze classes, perhaps). We have a few errands today we can attend to: gassing up the Renault (pumping good money after bad), hitting the ATM (we’ve been alerted to more April birthdays among the staff), and finding an Easter basket (I’ll explain later). However, I think today is going to be spent mostly within the confines of our hotel discovering its more subtle amenities.

For example, there’s this garbage can in our hotel room that has four, multi-colored dividers in it, presumably for graduate-level recycling. Now I can’t even begin to guess the international color codes for recycling, so I have no clue whether our spent, Jameson bottles go in the blue quadrant and the Lindt chocolate wrappers go in the yellow quadrant or vice versa. I do know that we always seem to generate a freakish amount of trash in our hotel room, and cordoning off our thimble-sized trash bin into four smaller sections does not help me, the environment, or the housekeeping staff. Thanks to back surgeries and general apathy, I’m not about to bend over to my ankles to try and eco-sort my refuse, so I’ve resorted to treating it like a carnival game, and I simply drop my trash over the can from waist height. About 95% of the time it bounces off one of the dividers and lands on the floor. That’s not only a loser but housekeeping’s problem in the morning. On the off chance it finds its way into one of the colored sub-chambers, I feel like someone owes me enough tickets for a free, foam sombrero. If by chance it lands in the right section, a bagged goldfish.

Assuming the rain doesn’t let up, be sure to check back here tomorrow for an engaging essay on the elevator’s buttons.

Tchau for now.