On that cold November day, I drove to the Cape, stopping at my friend, Susan's house in Bourne on the way. Susan was preparing for a dinner that night, and had asked me to stay, but I declined, saying I'd already had reservations at the hotel, and my first realty appointment was very early in the morning. The original plan was to bring both dogs with me, the Seaside being a dog-friendly hotel, even on-season. At the last minute, I decided to leave the dogs at home with Gil and make the journey alone.
After having lunch at Susan's, I got back in the car for the one-hour trek from the "elbow" of the Cape to the very tip and P'town. I took the scenic Route 6A, "the long way" seeing as how traffic was light and it is a beautiful drive. I arrived in Provincetown at 4:50 p.m., almost dark. I pull in the parking lot of this hotel I've never stayed at, and it is one of these Hampton-beachy-type places. Pretty run-down, and old. The parking lot is dead-empty, and signs all over the place say "closed for the season."
I almost drove away, but I decided to go to the office, which was down a long, dark alleyway that goes underneath the building overhead. I get to the office, and the door is locked. The lights are out, and there's an envelope taped to the door that says "K. Mueller, here is your key. You are in room 309." I look at it, leave the envelope taped to the door, and start to walk away back to my car, fully intending on sitting in the car and deciding if I really want to do this. Every ounce of my intuition screaming at me not to stay there. As I turn to walk away, a little old lady and a little old man appear inside the darkened glass door of the office. They open the door, say hello, and ask me to come in. I go in, and the lady says, "You're our only guest tonight, and we're closing for the season on Wednesday, but we have some construction workers who will be staying here tomorrow night. You're alone tonight, and we're here, but off-premises. If you need anything, here's the number you should call." and she slides a piece of paper toward me with a number written on it. Then, the husband says, "Ever heard of the movie 'The Shining'? I say, "Yeah," (I've seen it 5 million times, it's one of Gil's faves). "Yeah," I say, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
The husband says to me, "You have to take the ELEVATOR to the 3rd floor." I felt like saying, "why am I on the 3rd floor, if I'm the only guest?" But I didn't. By the way, elevators are one of my least favorite things -- one of my biggest fears, especially small, old ones. (Ask Andrea some time, and she'll tell you of the episode at the Hyatt Regency Los Angeles when I hopped off the elevator just as it was about to take us up 22 floors. Andrea and Bob reported me missing that night. But that's a different story.)
I go back to my car and get my stuff. Two bags, my neck-support pillow (these were the earliest days of my fibromyalgia, before I knew what all this chronic pain was about), and a six-pack of bottled water. I get into the small, old, European-sized elevator, press 3, and clunkety-clunk-clunk up to the third floor.
The elevator door sighs open with an enormous, audible fuss. My room is about five doors down on the left. The hotel is one of these with an outdoor corridor on the street side and balconies with sliding glass doors overlooking the beach on the other side. I open the highly unsecure, rickety, metal hotel room door with the (regular) key (no security cards here!). The room is so small it is ridiculous. "Imagine if I had two large dogs and Gil with me," I think! Talk about claustrophobia. I shut the door, lock it, and pull on it to see how secure it is (not!). I check behind the shower curtain (after all, I had just watched "Psycho" only a few days before, on Halloween night!). I look at the bed, which has a CANOPY over it (that's right up there with small, rickety, old elevators on my list of things I hate the most. One day I'll tell you about the trip to New York City, and the sleepless night I spent on a floor of a hotel room that had a wooden -- yes, wooden, canopy over the bed, suspended from the ceiling by flimsy metal brackets.) Back to P'town and the lovely Seaside Inn: I realize I will not sleep if I'm in a canopied bed, and sleep is one of the main reasons for this trip. After all, let us remember, these were the early days of my mysterious chronic fatigue and pain syndrome, and I didn't yet understand what all that disordered sleep was about.
I turn on the TV, look at the telephone, and open the curtain to the sliding door which opens onto a balcony overlooking Cape Cod Bay. Then, I open the sliding door and look outside. The balcony is as rickety as everything else, about three feet long by one foot wide in size. And underneath? A sheer drop, arguably to one's death. I look down, and, like something from (yes) a Stephen King movie, the waves are violently crashing onto the giant boulders below me. "Where's the beach?" I wonder. If I stepped onto this balcony with two 80-pound dogs, I believe we would most assuredly fall. I say to myself, practically out loud, "I am so f*&%n' outta here!" I have never, ever, been so frightened in my entire life.
I shut off the TV, grab my two bags, pillow, the water, shove the key back inside the envelope and hightail it, not down the elevator, but down three flights of -- you guessed it -- rickety wooden stairs at the far end of the outdoor corridor.
I run down the alleyway past the office, try the door. It's locked. I toss the envelope on the ground, outside the door, and book it as fast as I can to my car. Mrs. Hotel Lady comes running out of the building, shouting, "Kathleeeeeeen!" I stop. Turn around. And say, "I'm so sorry, but I simply cannot stay here tonight. I'm really sorry. You can charge me, I don't care."
She replies, "I would have wanted to know, too. That's why I told you, dear. I'm going to refund all your money to your credit card." (Footnote: two years and several consumer complaints later, I never got that money back.) At that moment, I thanked her for being so kind, and ran to my car. The six-pack of H2O so heavy and pulling on my wrist where I had looped it for fast-carrying. In one swoop, I opened the hatchback of the Subaru, and threw everything inside at once, wrenching my wrists, bad. Another fibromyalgia affliction, unbeknownst to me at the time. The wrist sprain and pain would last for many months, a souvenir of my off-season, brief visit to Provincetown.
I drive as fast as I can, not down beautiful Route 6A this time, but along the Mid-Cape Highway, Route 6. Before I know it, I'm hurtling by the Provincetown dunes, and on my way into Truro. I pluck the cell phone out of my purse and dial Gil, who is at home in Spencer. I am sobbing, incoherent, hysterical. I tell him I'm driving home. It's now dark, and after 6:00 p.m. I've been on the road since 9:00 a.m. He convinces me to head to Eastham, to the good ol' Sheraton where we always stay when we visit the Cape.
Forty minutes later, I arrived in the Sheraton parking lot. The hotel is open all right, but there are only two cars in the lot. Still in tears, I call Gil from the car, again. "I want to go home!!" He convinces me to go check in to the hotel. He says that I will be safe (after all, this is a secure hotel). I check in, and it takes me a couple of hours to calm down, but I realize there are about eight other guests, and everything is OK. I am safe. I miss my dogs.
I spent the next day looking at dozens of houses in Truro and Wellfleet. That night, there were probably only two other guests at the hotel, but I still was safe. I had the delight of using the indoor pool, after going to T.J. Maxx in Orleans to buy some workout gear that would pass as a bathing suit.
In the end, after all that, I found our house, so it was well worth it!
All of my appointments on the final day of house-hunting were in Eastham, mostly on the bay side, except for one property on the ocean side. The very last house on the list of viewing appointments. After over a year of looking, and probably 30 properties, this was the last house to see. I hadn't liked any of the others. I had given up. I'd packed up the car, and followed the realtor over to Nauset Light Beach in my own car. I would grab a sandwich at the Box Lunch, and make my way home to Worcester County, videos of dozens of houses in hand, but none of them to our liking, or so I envisioned. When I entered the house, I knew it'd be "the one."
The house is in Eastham, on the same "spectacular" ocean-side beach as all the ones I'd looked at in Wellfleet and Truro a year earlier. Only in Eastham, the homes were half the price of those rundown shacks in snooty Wellfleet and deserted Truro. It's a seasonal cottage, built a few years before I was born, and very private and isolated on Nauset Light Beach, right next-door to the lighthouse. Nobody can build around it because it's National Seashore protected. What's nice is, it's an hour closer to home than Truro and Wellfleet, half the price, and there are stores nearby (civilization!), two bathrooms, and it's on the ocean. The house even had a new roof, and one bathroom had been totally renovated. It was just what we were looking for, and I found it (like every other good thing in my life: Gil, Hobie, my job!) when I wasn't even looking!
All original material copyright © Kathleen S. Mueller. All rights reserved.