Sleep Inne

There’s a joke circulating on the internet that goes something like this: A business traveller’s plane crashes, and he’s marooned on a desert island. He builds a crude lean-to and survives by eating coconuts and drinking coconut milk. Months later, tired of his monotonous diet and nearly insane with boredom, he decides to explore the island. After a long and tiring hike he meets a beautiful woman. Sure enough, she had been in the same plane crash. It turns out that she was an engineer before the plane crash, and she invites him to the attractive palm-thatched home she has built. “Would you like something to eat?” she asks. “Not if it’s coconuts. I’m really sick of them.” The woman explains how she has trapped the wild boars that roam the island and cured their haunches into ham. She’s also made bread made from the starchy breadfruit that grew nearby. She brings him a ham sandwich. “And how about a drink?” she asks. “No thanks, I’m really sick of coconut milk.” The woman explains that she can make him a Pina Colada; she has built a small still to make rum, and found a small grove of pineapple trees.

He sits on her porch in a hammock she wove from palm fronds, eating the sandwich, drinking the Pina Colada and watching a glorious tropical sunset. She joins him in the hammock, leans close, and whispers in his ear “I bet there’s something else you’ve been missing, too.” The business traveller’s heart is thumping. He looks her in the eye and says “You mean…I can check my email from here?”

I know exactly how he felt. For technical reasons most of you don’t want to know about, I am unable to check my email (for the rest of you, installing VPN software probably trashed my IP stack and the dongle on my PCMCIA card is flaky, too). To compound my stress, the day I decide to leave coincides with an elaborate April Fools hoax that I’m playing on my entire division at work. This involves an announcement about a new system for ordering lunch online at our corporate headquarters. It includes a notice of training sessions in the lunch-ordering module, and is followed by a set of instructions including several screen shots. All of this was to have delivered by email. I suspected my laptop might fail me, and have arranged for a co-conspirator to help with the scheme, but I’m forced to wait a full week before I check my mail for the various replies. Throughout the entire trip to New York and Minnesota I’m imagining my mailbox filling up, and have the terrible sense of helplessness and forboding I usually get only when I think I might have left the bathtub running at home.

The Minnesota trip itself was short and dull. I arrived late in the evening. The Raddison Metrodome (on the University of Minnesota campus) is hard to classify on the Aminzade scale. A 46-inch towel, but the soap products are lower-to-dead middle (Raddison brand shampoo-conditioner combo), and there’s no wicker basket, shoe mitt, or sewing kit. The lobby is filled with award plaques from various travel-rating companies, but none of them is less than a decade old. I had a nice dinner with my brother and his family at a casual but very classy restaurant.

I was looking forward to a peaceful return trip — first class upgrades all the way, hurrah. Instead, my flight was delayed over an hour, and I missed the last plane to Vermont that night. USAIR gave me a voucher for some place called the Sleep Inne. I arrived there at 11:30, fell asleep about an hour later, and got a computerized wake-up call at 5:30 AM so I could catch the first flight in Vermont.

It was a strange experience. The hotel stay felt like part of the trip, and I felt as if I’d never left the airport. My only hint that I was in Pittsburgh was the distinctive Appalachian contour of the land visible just beyond the headlights of the Sleep Inne van as it drove me from the airport and back. The Inne shares a West Pennsylvania hilltop with a Super-K-Mart.

The Sleep Inne itself is a cut above the Motel 6 but exhibits all the telltale signs of lower-middle hotelhood — one bar of white soap, combo nanobottle, towels something less than 44″. But very clean. The van driver tells me this as he shuttles me there. “The airline crews stay here a lot because it’s cheap and very clean.” And clean it is. Excruciatingly clean, depressingly clean, insomnia-inducing clean. I miss my personal dust bunnies and the smell of yesterdays dinner wafting from the trash. Mr. Van driver also recommends the complimentary continental breakfast. Jelly donuts, Froot Loops and nondairy creamer.

Every flight I take to anyplace in the nation seems to be routed through Pittsburgh, but to get to Burlington from Pittsburgh involves changing planes in Albany and riding a very small and noisy plane up the Champlain valley and across the lake. It’ an overcast day and we ride just below the clouds for most of the trip. Bumpy but beautiful.

That evening, sleep-deprived, I got a call from my mother. To my surprise, she had been tracking my every move. Before I left New York, she asked for my outgoing flight number, so I handed her a copy of my itinerary. She has been tenaciously calling the airline and tracking every step of my journey — missed connection, hotel stay, connection in Albany and return to Vermont.