Editor's note: Here is the next chapter of my book about traveling throughout the United States during the COV$D years. My working title right now is "A Tale of 22 Cities: Traveling Across America during the Great Lock-Down". BTW, it is now Day 882 of said lock-down, the biggest waste of time and money in human history.
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Local haunts: Visiting haunted hotels closer to home during the COV$D panic of 2020
Having finally gotten bored with paying extravagant airfares
and enduring snack-less flights with no movies or food service,
I started hanging out in local haunted hotels and taking stay-cations instead.
May 11, 2020: First there was my adventure at the Rose
Garden Inn up near U.C. Berkeley.
Another lovely Victorian-era hotel with cheap mid-plandemic rates. Went for a walk in the rain up to the Cal
campus. So much history there too. Came back to the hotel and struck up a
brief conversation with a handsome young man staying in a room down the hall. Neither of us was too keen on wearing face
masks and we had a lot of other stuff in common.
Later that afternoon
we went out into the hotel's actual rose garden and talked for an hour. But then.
Damned if he didn’t start getting all romantic. Say what?
“I’m old enough to be your grandmother!”
That was certainly a haunting moment.
Couldn’t believe that I was turning this handsome hunk down. Went out and walked around in the rain again
until either he or I cooled off.
August 14, 2020: After my
latest trip across America, I was all burnt out and having many strange dreams
including one about a gigantic tsunami wave among other things. Perhaps I got COV$D on that last trip? Or had my brain been invaded by
interplanetary beings? In any case I
feel much better now. Why? Because
I’m on a stay-cation at the fabulous Claremont Hotel! That’s why. Good idea.
Spent the last of my stimulus check on it. Money well spent. The rambling old hotel, up in the hills above
Berkeley, is all Victorian and lovely.
It’s reputed to be haunted but I haven't seen any ghosts so far. However, they did offer an irresistible
mid-plandemic rate on my room.
Went to a nearby restaurant,
Rick & Ann’s, for their take-out gluten-free pizza. Stuffed my face. Wallowed in luxury for one night. Enjoyed the view. Bathed in a gi-normous oval bathtub in a
gigantic marble bath suite.
Luxury.
I deserve it.
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Dream
report: I took one of my grandchildren back to
my home. She was totally
indifferent. “But you used to love these
toys,” I cried. Moral? I guess that one can dream at the Claremont
Hotel too. “A cat can dare to look at a
king.”
The Queen Anne Hotel
September 9,
2020: I was walking down the
sidewalk next to the Berkeley Bowl -– until suddenly I wasn’t. Splat! One banged up knee, one cracked rib, one
sprained ankle and one broken arm later, I found myself magically transported
to Urgent Care. The magic was that I
could still walk!
Broken arm. Hurts like hell. Gigantic splint. I hate it.
September 10, 2020: Up all night with the pain. Can’t get an appointment with my orthopedic
surgeon until Monday. Horrors. Stuck with this gi-normous ugly splint from Urgent Care. Then I get an idea about how to cheer myself
up. I’ll go off and hunker down in some
haunted hotel! Port Costa has a haunted
hotel that used to be a bordello….
No, wait. San Francisco has a haunted hotel with a
benevolent ghost. “Our ghost comes and
tucks you in at night!” sez the brochure.
That’s just what I need! A
motherly ghost.
September 15, 2020: My bone doctor and I got into a huge argument
about COV$D. I still can’t believe that
after six months on lock-down, people still believe the hype. But the good news is that he said that I
didn’t need a cast, only a sling for two weeks –- so I forgave him for lacking
hardly any knowledge at all about viruses.
He’s a bone doctor not an expert on lock-downs and masks.
And now here I
am, at the famous Queen Anne hotel, tucking my own self into bed and waiting
for the ghost to bring me milk and cookies.
This place is fabulously amazing -– more like a Victoriana museum than a
hotel. I feel like I’m living in the
middle of the Dickens Fair! Love it.
Got here around
6:30 pm. So haven’t time to explore but
tomorrow I’ll take my EMF ghost-busting meter and explore. Am so looking forward to it. And regarding my recent fall? I couldn’t figure out why I fell. But somebody
just pointed out to me that it might have been a hitchhiking ghost from a
previous hotel that tripped me.
LOL? Or not. I bet it was that ghost from the Biltmore. The Black Dahlia?
September 16, 2020: Actually, this is a very comforting place to
sleep. I may just spend the entire day
in bed. Maybe. And boy did I dream. Dream #1 involved battles for the
land. First the Indians owned it –-
California Indians. Then the Spanish
came and took it over by force. Then the
Spanish got all upset and pissed off when American colonials arrived and tried
to grab the land from the Spanish. There
were lots of trees. I watched all this
happen.
Dream #2
involved a bunch of parents and teachers who all sat in a big circle. Then the parents, two at a time, got to sit in
the middle of the circle and get all their problems solved. I didn’t get to sit in the middle of the
circle. No problem-solving for me. I was bitter, resentful and pissed off.
Now I have 15
minutes to get up, get dressed and go off to breakfast before they close it
down. Ready, set, go! And, yes, the
waffles were delicious.
What happens
next? Two hours of computerized free-cell
solitaire. Convalescence. I came to San Francisco to convalesce. Where’s the fun in that? But by 2:00 pm I’d had enough R&R. Time to play tourist on the #38R bus.
OMG, they’ve
closed The Gap on Powell Street. So much
for shopping for jeans. Sigh. Gap jeans actually fit me. Crap.
I was about to splurge Big Time.
First retail shopping I’ve done in years -– and they close the freaking
store?
But walking that
mile down Market Street was nice too. In
my burka. They want me to wear a face mask? I’m upping the ante. But then I got kicked out of the Seven-Eleven
for not wearing a mask! Sheesh.
Ferry
building. Reading a book by the
water. Walking up Market Street. My usual tourist stuff. But let’s try something new. The Fillmore District! Gentrification gone cray-cray. The old Fillmore Auditorium, where I saw
Janis Joplin back in 1965, is now closed.
Gone are all those jazz clubs that Maya Angelou wrote about. Now we gots only upscale stuff. One mural there said it all. “Work –> sleep -> pay rent -> work ->
sleep -> pay rent.”
Went back to the
Queen Anne and spent ten minutes trying to not break my neck or drown while attempting to get out of
the bathtub. I hate this broken
arm. How humiliating it would be if I
had to spend the night in a bathtub waiting for housekeeping to pull me
out. Naked.
Watched TV. Played more free-cell. Watched more TV. At least I got some tourist stuff done before
lapsing back into hibernation. Now let’s
see what kind of tourism I can do in my dreams.
Happy stay-cation. I think.
September 17, 2020: What a horrible night I just had. My arm hurt dreadfully. My cracked rib and both knees did too. And my brain hurt most of all. Errant thoughts kept jamming it up. “What, exactly, do I intend to accomplish
during this lifetime,” was the major theme of my thoughts. Do I really truly think that I am actually
going to do any good in this world? And if so, how can
I do it more efficiently so that I don’t take such a heavy toll on my body and
mind? Plus my body is a hot mess right
now. Truly a hot mess. How am I going to get to Nashville next month
when I can barely hobble from my bed to the bathroom right now?
Dream
report: Construction on my apartment in
Berkeley revealed a dirt-floored cellar that had the iron skeletal remains of
old folding chairs and wheelbarrows.
This morning I
need to poke around and explore the Queen Anne some more. “It’s a four-star hotel,” says the
brochure. Not any more. Now it’s just another victim of COV$D restrictions. How very sad.
I hate this
lock-down. It has managed to
do what 9-11 and all those trumped-up “wars" on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and
Syria couldn’t quite accomplish -– break the spine of the American economy.
September 18, 2020: My arm hurts.
My knees hurt. I’m
depressed. This stay-cation just didn’t
do what I thought it would do. Sure, I
had a good adventure touring lovely San Francisco -– but I did not come back
home refreshed. Perhaps I need to start
spending money on making my home more livable instead of dropping inconvenient bundles
of cash on searching elsewhere for the Bluebird of Happiness.
Damn, I hate being
tired, angry, bored, depressed and in pain.
What would Johnny Cash do? Go to
Nashville!
The Doubletree
The Sens Hotel
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My room has a
French theme. French provincial. The Hallmark channel. I’m loving it. Oops.
Now I’m hungry. Really hungry. 45 minutes until I meet Tanya. How could I not have packed any snacks! But then Tanya arrived, the food arrived and
boy did we have fun.
Tanya brought
wine glasses, a table cloth, place mats, napkin rings and flowers. I brought wine and candlesticks. We sat out on the balcony overlooking a
Safeway parking lot, eating a top-of-the-line gourmet four-course gourmet
feast. Happy birthday Tanya!
First we
laughed. Then we laughed some more. And ate smoked rock cod, spit-roasted pork
loin, garlic-potato puree and vanilla pannacotta with blood orange gelee. Then Tanya produced a tres leches birthday cake just in case. “We’re living high on the hog tonight,” as my
mother used to say.
February 12, 2021: It’s now 4:55 am and I am totally wide
awake. The Hallmark channel has even
gone off-air. Tanya went home seven
hours ago. I watched cable news for a
while. One would think that if anything
would put you to sleep, cable news would do it.
But no. Doomed. I’m doomed.
The queen of insomnia. Perhaps
this hotel is haunted too? Oh well. It was still worth it. In terms of this current plandemic, an
evening filled with laughter is priceless.
7:01 am: Still reading books, pacing the floor, eating
leftover tres leches cake and
channel-surfing cable TV. I’ve totally
given up on sleep.
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