Maquinna's Poop du Jour

Tales from the Honeymoon, Part Three

The Cabin From Hell

Craig and I are at odds about this one. He would prefer to pretend it never happened and never think on it again. I, on the other hand, have decided the only way I can deal with the incident is to try and make it amusing enough in retrospect that I can put the horror behind me.

Half-way through our journey in Nova Scotia, we hit the island of Cape Breton late in the evening and promptly started looking for a low-key place to spend the night. A quiet motel or something along those lines would have been just fine. All we needed was a place to crash, then get up in the morning and get on our way.

We had stopped at some beachside cottages just outside of Antigonish, only to discover they were all booked up. The owner said we'd probably have trouble finding anything in the area as there was a very large Highland dance competition on that weekend. We decided then to head right into Cape Breton and away from the no vacancy signs.

After much stumbling about the backroads, and repeatedly asking Craig...so, do you think there are any TOWNS on this road somewhere?...we found ourselves bouncing over 20 miles of dirt road into nowhere, and popping out on the other side in Canada's answer to Brigadoon, circa 1974. A small one-pump gas station with a little corner store attached to someone's home, the blue cathode-tube glow the only indication of life. We thought we'd at least go in and try and find out where the hell we were.

The woman behind the counter was in her 60s or so, in requisite polyester, her grey hair set off by a backdrop collage of hundreds of photos of small children - possibly all the same three kids, I really don't know. Her practised reply to our question - 'why, you're in beautiful River Denys, of course.' Which was about like saying that we should bless the gods that led us to a dungheap in the middle of frickin' nowhere. We asked if there were any motels or cottages nearby...oh, had we simply asked instead for directions to the Trans-Canada highway...

'Why, we have cottages right here!' she was happy to tell us. 'Let me just get my husband.'

She bellowed over the half-door dividing the store from their crocheted-afghan covered living room, rousing a man who plainly would have preferred not to have been disturbed for the rest of the evening. He escorted us to their 'cottages'.

'There's an in-ground pool too, you know!' she said as we were led out back.

After determining that all we really needed was a bed, the man showed us the smallest of the cottages, all of which came with their own kitchenettes, sitting areas, full bath, and abandoned wreck of a car on blocks in 3 feet of tall grass beside them. Going inside, he showed us the breakers to turn on the stove (not necessary, but he turned it on anyway), the cable TV with movie box (not necessary, we won't be watching any TV), made sure there were towels, and then charged us $50. It wasn't pretty, but I figured what the hell. We just need to sleep and get going in the morning.

We dragged our bags in, and then the filthy hell began to reveal itself. There was a fist-sized hole in the panelling right by the door. The handle to the bathroom fell off the moment I tried to close the door behind me. There was a layer of mildew in the fridge that told me everything I needed to know about when this place was last cleaned. The greasy dust on the drapes was an inch thick. There wasn't a magazine earlier than Ben Affleck's first reported flirtation with rehab in 2001. Every towel in the bathroom looked as though it had been brought out of open storage in a leaky basement.

I feared what I might find near the bed. I went upstairs and inspected it, and decided the sheets seemed to be clean, so I didn't insist on bringing the sleeping bags in from the car. Honestly, I really think I was just trying to convince myself that they were.

We played a round of cards and went to bed. Immediate problems became apparent. The bed had a serious list to the port side - my side of the bed - and I felt like I was going to have to hold onto Craig for dear life not to fall on the floor. The pillows had as much oomph as cast iron pans. And the sheets...well...maybe they were clean, maybe not. Lights out, we could hear the mosquitoes buzzing around our heads. I stuck my head under the covers.

And then the dinging began. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding...

Apparently the stove had an oven timer on it. We went downstairs and tried to make it stop.

An hour later: Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding...

Fuck. We got out of bed and headed downstairs again, and spun some other knobs to make it stop.

You can guess what happened an hour later. I couldn't deal with it at this point. Craig got up, went downstairs, and flipped the breaker off. Dinging dealt with. On his way back upstairs he grabbed the bug spray and sprayed my head as I lay there trying to doze.

I barely slept all night. I couldn't relax. When light hit, I started packing up right away and tapped my foot impatiently as Craig attended to his morning constitutional on the john. I was so stressed about the place my bowels refused to budge in it.

Later, when I asked Craig what grossed him out most about it, he said that it was when he went downstairs in his socks, and the toe of his foot slid under the sofa and got stuck in something on the linoleum under it.

When the man had been showing us the cottage, Craig asked him if they got many people like us who just come in off the road. He said that mostly they had return customers, people who came back time and again because they like the place.

I shudder to imagine.

posted by Maquinna @ 2:43 p.m.