Toe Zombies, Stranger Cooties and Other Hazards of Travel

Another highlight was following behind one of these trucks.
Underneath the appetizing pictures of fresh produce it had
a nice set of mudflaps with rats on them, their little jaws
gaping upwards in longing at the salad forever out of reach.
Mom's Meals: Better Wash That Lettuce!

So, I just returned from a business trip to East Texas. Various parts of the trip did not go as planned, due to reasons that will have to wait to be revealed in my post-retirement memoir, "How Being a Manager Caused Me To Despair of the Basic Common Sense of Humanity." But there were some highlights: off duty, I got to catch up with some friends. I got to relax at one of my favorite places (Lake o' the Pines).

Also, I got to see two billboards for Badders Law Firm, which was just awesome. I can only imagine the TV commercials: "Why hire a good attorney when you can get Badders?" or "Have you been bad? Get Badders!" Literally, this kept me occupied for the whole round trip between Lufkin and Nacogdoches, which is one possible explanation for how I got lost in both towns, which combined are a third the size of Round Rock, unless you want to attribute getting lost to Mercury being in retrograde. No, I did not use voice navigation, for reasons that may be summarized as, my phone stinks. Don't buy a Windows phone, even if it is only $40. Perhaps especially if it is only $40.

Bed at La Quinta of Lufkin,
both before and after sleeping.

I like East Texas. I like driving. I like looking at cows and barns and very tall trees. I like visiting friends. One thing I do not like, however, is sleeping in foreign beds. I have this weird hangup: if I have to sleep away from home, I rarely sleep under the covers. If I'm traveling with the kids and sharing a bed, I can make myself get under the covers, but it requires conscious effort, the same sort of effort and internal dialogue required to get me to voluntarily place phone calls ("C'mon, do it, do it, do it...DO IT!"). Otherwise, nope. If I'm too tired or lack the mental energy to make myself get under the covers, I'm spending the night on top of the bedspread.

Why? For one thing, Quora. If you don't subscribe, Quora is a place where people can ask random questions (such as travel hacks) and be answered by other random people who have some knowledge of the subject (such as former hotel employees). I've read numerous such posts describing how seldom cheap hotels change sheets, which makes sleeping in a hotel bed kind of like cuddling with a stranger you never see, which is pretty skeevy. I try to keep a healthy skepticism for things I've read on the Internet, but in this case my sense of skepticism has been pretty thoroughly bludgeoned by my sense of ewwwww.

It is a well known fact that, like the
draugr of Icelandic myth, there are
little zombies that live deep in the
dark, claustrophobic sheet caves
and come out at night to feast on the
feet of weary travelers.

Another contributing factor is The Toe Coffin: people who really make a bed properly (including hotel housekeepers and my mother) get the sheets and blankets so tight that I feel like my feet are confined, straightjacketed, imprisoned in a shroud of blankets. Sliding your toes down into that small, dark prison is an act of trust and commitment: there could be anything down there with them and I couldn't see it: bed bugs, a previous guest's toenail clippings, bloodstains, a stray revenant rising up from the toe coffin to eat my toes--anything! It just feels a bit risky.

Caprock Canyon: Because free-
roaming bison are AWESOME.

I can trace this weird phobia back to a single, triggering event. Several years back, I decided to spontaneously run away from my problems by taking a road trip to Caprock Canyon, one of my favorite state parks. My original intent had been to pitch a tent in the park, but it was cold and I also have a hangup about not being able to pitch a tent properly and being laughed at by real outdoorspeople (a hangup that, by the way, has caused real outdoorspeople to laugh at me while never having been actually tested by me even attempting to pitch a tent). Mainly, it was really cold. So I got a hotel. There are not many towns near Quitaque, and the few there are are not large enough to support a decent hotel, so I wound up at what might charitably be described as a dive, one so remote and dusty and dank that, had it been in a metropolitan area, it would have been what my friend Angie used to call a HO-tel. It is possible that the carpeting had once been lime green shag, but equally likely could have been a beige textured carpet that had been thrown up on by goats for decades, or a yellow carpet that had had an unfortunate encounter with radiation, perhaps through a botched arms deal. The bedspread was polyester, with a bold 70's print yellowed with age. For the first time in my life, I pulled down the covers on a bed, said nope, and pulled them right back up. I also didn't take my shoes off and checked out at dawn.

I heard these sheets being taken out of the
dryer, having been washed especially for me
and put on the bed warm...and I still couldn't
do it. Toe zombies do not care about such
niceties as cleanliness, warmth, or the
possibility of offending one's friends.
They are kind of mean that way.

Since that fateful night, all beds have become suspect, except my own. Even when visiting my mother (when she still lived in Houston) and sleeping in the same exact bed I had been sleeping in for a decade, I wound up on top of the bed more often than not and my mother is one of the cleanest people I know, with a rigid schedule of sheet washing and seasonal sheet rotation.

Sometimes, if it is cold or I have children with me, I can succeed in coaching myself under the covers, but it definitely requires effort, and I do not like it. In fact, I will usually pull the covers out so that I can cover my body with the blanket while leaving my feet zombie free on top of the covers. Every year, I consider bringing my own quilt on our family vacations, but then I remember the packing limitation and can't come up with a convincing reason why the kids wouldn't be able to bring pants.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty harmless and quirky hangup, so I generally indulge it. That means, though, if I'm ever a guest at your house, please be sure to leave an extra blanket on the guest bed and don't worry about changing the sheets: I won't be using them.

I may not be able to tell you the month (or sometimes year) when my sheets 
were last changed, but they are 100 toe zombie free and devoid of stranger 
cooties. They also come with cats, and Bob Cat only bites feet above the covers.
There's no place like home!