So, I just got back from Leavenworth, Washington, and I’d just like to take this time to renew my promise to never, ever go back to Leavenworth, Washington. The first time I made this vow was several years back, after returning from a German class trip that seemed to last a full lunar cycle and consisted mainly of me being punched repeatedly in the face by boredom. I had not intended to break my solemn oath to never set foot in Leavenworth again, but, unfortunately, the wedding of my wife’s oldest sister allowed the petulant little town to grab me by the throat with its meaty, sausage-stained hands and drag me back in.
For those of you unfamiliar with Leavenworth, it’s a tiny little dot in central Washington that, for some ungodly reason, has decided it needs to be a Bavarian themed enclave. Not actual Bavaria, mind you, or even Bavaria as seen in movies. No, this is more like if a Martian sent to Earth to report on our culture watched a movie featuring real Bavaria and then tried to describe it to his Martian friends. Everything is white with brown trim (even the McDonald’s and the Starbucks), and most places are described as being “Ye Olde” and/or “Shoppes.” Really, it’s Grandma’s House: The Town. So you can probably understand why I was not thrilled to be rolling back into Fake Germany.
Not wanting to kill our ailing car, we opted to take a Greyhound bus instead. Now, last time I took a Greyhound, there were some interesting people on the bus, but at least they were quiet. This was not a quality shared by our traveling companions this time. On the way to Leavenworth we sat in front of the Jungian archetypal nerd-couple. The guy was roughly the size of the moon and was wearing shorts that looked like they hadn’t been washed since last November and a black button-up shirt covered in little tiny AC/DC logos that he clearly thought was badass. His girlfriend, who made him look like Jack Skellington, was a straight from the box nerdy loser girlfriend, down to the pasty, doughy skin, the wiry orange-red clown hair, and the low-rise hip-hugger jeans with flab hanging over them, making her look like a just-split can of ready-made biscuits. These two talked the entire trip in excessively loud voices about…
-Their friend who is having an incestuous relationship with her uncle
-How Male Half of Nerd Couple is a big strong man that everyone is afraid of
-Every single three year or older internet meme (little advice…even if the joke was funny online, that seldom translates to funny in the three dimensional world)
-The rules of comedy (according to Male Half, when giving advice to Female Half on how to be more hilarious, “You need to work on making thing completely random. The more random things are, the funnier they are.” Thanks, jackass. It’s people like you who are keeping Family Guy on the air).
-How much they love to cut themselves for fun. Yes, they’re cutters, too!
But the mainstay of their conversation was Male Half’s deep and abiding love for World of Warcraft. Our entire bus was subjected to two hour screed about how sick he is of people who “won’t take the game seriously” and “don’t even bother to do research on the history of the World of Warcraft universe!” Pepper in lots of discussions of dark elves and druids, and we were all ready for him to return to talking about how he likes to drag a box cutter across his knuckles.
Eventually, though, we did arrive in Leavenworth. Somehow, over the last eight years, Leavenworth has managed to become even more annoying than I remembered it. For starters, when I went in high school, the who place was practically deserted. Well, eight years has, apparently, made the world go cuckoo for Bavarian themed towns that are the greatest offense to the German people since the firebombing of Dresden. The place was absolutely packed. It was like a German-themed Mardi Gras, but with out the floats or drunkenly exposed breasts. So, even though Leavenworth is roughly the size of the room I’m currently sitting in, it took forever to push through the throngs of unwashed tourists, all who had to stop ever six feet to point and say, “Look! There’s *another* nutcracker!”
Wife and I had booked ourselves a room at the Hotel Edelweiss, right in the center of the madness. Here’s a little tip: don’t book a room at the Hotel Edelweiss. It is easily the worst space I’ve ever occupied, and that’s a list that includes two dorm rooms and a jail cell. First off, the hotel entrance is just a barely-marked glass door in the side of a building, wedged between two tourist-crap stores. But don’t worry, you don’t actually get to check in there. No, instead, you have to go three blocks over and down an alley until you find a door marked “Sunspots Hotels” (which shares its building with a soap-making factory). That’s where you check in. No, really. But, of course, we got to Leavenworth around one in the afternoon, and, as our confirmation email told us, check-in wasn’t until four. So we wandered around, lugging our bags everywhere, trying not to die of whimsy-overdoses. Once we’d managed to kill three hours (they didn’t go down without a fight, let me tell you), we dragged ourselves back to the soap-factory office to check in. Unfortunately for us, in keeping with Leavenworth’s “Fuck you” theme, no one was there, and the closed sign was still up (the one that very, very clearly says right on it that on Friday and Saturday, they would be open from four PM to six PM for check-ins). So we waited. And waited. And waited. And, finally, at about four thirty, called the emergency number and asked, “Um…what the hell?” The woman on the phone went off about how they had “been trying to contact me all day” but they couldn’t reach me (…because, oh, I don’t know, I WASN’T AT MY FUCKING HOUSE, I HAD ARRANGED A STAY AT A HOTEL, YOU UNSTOPPABLE IDIOT). After saying that she accepted my apology for not leaving a cell phone number instead (…which it never asked for…and, also, I did not and would not apologize), she informed me that their check-in office is closed on Fridays. Yes, the check-in office that I was standing right in front of, that had a sign on it that clearly states in big, bold letters that they are most certainly open on Fridays after four. Again, she reiterated that forgave me for my mistake, and said she’d send someone in “in about half an hour” to get us a key. Now, normally in situations where a business does something seemingly incredibly fucked up, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say, “Well, I don’t know the (whatever) industry, so maybe that’s just how it works everywhere.” But here’s the thing; I DO know the hotel industry! I know it really damn well. This is not how the hotel industry works! First off, I could go down to, say, the (sic) Rodeway Inn, the seediest of seedy motels in downtown Spokane, and buy a room (probably for half the price of the Hotel Edelweiss) from an office that, strangely, ISN’T three blocks away in the back room of a soap factory, and have someone give me a key during their stated business hours. German efficiency, my ass. Fortunately for the woman on the phone and the person who, forty-five minutes later, showed up to give me our keys, I was so exhausted and just wanting to put my luggage down that I just took the keys and dragged myself back to the actual hotel.
I’ve never seen a self-service hotel before, but I’m pretty sure that’s what the Hotel Edelweiss is. I wasn’t expecting any kind of real luxury (Leavenworth is a ridiculously expensive little town, and the Edelweiss was the cheapest option…which still put it significantly costlier than a lot of Spokane hotels), and I knew about the shared bathroom (which they refer to as “European Style”….also known as “Dorm room” or “prison” style). But I expected that maybe, just maybe, SOMEONE would be working at the hotel. But no, there was literally no one working in the actual hotel. Ever. There was a big desk that said “reservations” over it, but no one was ever at it (and I don’t know how you’d use it anyway, since you need your key to actually enter the hotel itself). Our room was smaller than my dorm room at UW, and didn’t have any high-end luxury items like a phone or a clock. The bed seemed to be made out of the same material they make those pizza cooking stones out of, and it was at least fifteen degrees warmer in the room than it was outside. My favorite touch was that it was the only hotel or motel I’ve ever been in that did not have a Bible in the bedside table. Given the quality of everything else in the hotel, I was more expecting to open the drawer and find the Book of Mormon, but no, absolutely nothing. Apparently, the Gideons feel that, if you’re staying at the Hotel Edelweiss, you’ll no longer fear hell. The good news on the first night was that there was only one other occupied room in the whole place (and, since there’s no staff, that brought the entire population of the hotel to four people). This was good, since the walls were pretty much made of spackle, and we could very easily hear everything that the other couple was saying (or, in some cases, grunting and moaning…apparently they got bored around six AM) as if they were in the room with us. Again, in case I’m being too subtle about my overall message, let me reiterate; do not stay at the Hotel Edelweiss.
Now, as part of the wedding festivities, Beth and her youngest sister, Diane, had to go to the rehearsal at the hotel where the wedding was going to be held, which was seventeen miles away from Leavenworth Prime down a road called, and I swear this isn’t me making up a name to make fun of it, the Chumstick Highway. That left me milling around for a few hours until the rehearsal dinner (which, unlike the rehearsal, I *was* invited to). This, like most of my plans this weekend, involved me pairing up with Diane’s boyfriend, Nick. Now, I’ll admit, I was pretty apprehensive about this going in. I’d never met Nick before, and I tend to find some way to become critically annoyed with ninety percent of the people I encounter (see: every post in this blog, ever), yet the stated itinerary had me spending large amounts of time with him. Fortunately, this is one of the few things that worked out for the better, as Nick is actually a really cool guy who did not at any point find a way to annoy me. I was surprised, too. So Nick met me at the Edelweiss and we walked over to the restaurant, a place called Gustav’s, and told them that we were there with the wedding rehearsal dinner. They led us up stairs, where we found…no one. You see, even though were were like five minutes late for the stated time, everyone else was a good fifteen minutes later than that. And, since they had a very clear set of tables set up for the party, and Nick and I were barely a part of this whole thing, we didn’t want to take seats yet. So we just stood there like goons and drew suspicious looks from the wait-staff (including one guy who I’m pretty certain thought we were crashers). Fortunately, everyone else did, eventually, arrive, and the food was pretty good.
The next day started bright and early (thank God for our cell phone’s alarm clock feature), with Beth going off to get her hair done with the rest of the bridal party and me wandering around Leavenworth yet again. Here’s another annoying thing about Leavenworth: nothing opens until about eleven. Thank God for Starbucks, or I would have just passed out from boredom at the base of the maypole. As the hours passed, I headed back to our room and decided to save some time later by pre-tying my tie (I hate tying ties). So I open up the bag with my suit in it and discover….Well, this’ll take some explaining. Beth has this fancy belted shirt with a black fabric belt that looks very, very similar to my black tie, and which she decided to keep next to my black tie. So guess what I grabbed instead of my black tie. So thus started my frantic tie-quest, going to literally any store that was a) open and b) might possibly sell ties. But guess what you absolutely cannot buy in Leavenworth. The closest I came was a Harry Potter tie at a costume store that, sadly, I did honestly ponder purchasing for a handful of seconds.
My mission a failure, I went back to the room again and got changed into my suit (sans tie, of course) and then walked over to Nick’s hotel, from which we would then drive out into The Hills Have Eyes country to the wedding. I’m very, very glad I was not the one behind the wheel, as the road up to the hotel where the wedding was being held was long, winding, and highly confusing, especially with the GPS and Diane conspiring to kill us. At one point, the GPS led us to a bridge that was very much out (as indicated by the giant “BRIDGE OUT, DUMBASS” signs). Thoroughly lost and the GPS not backing down, Nick decided to call Diane, who tried to convince us to go across the bridge anyway. I can only imagine this was preceded by a conversation between Diane and Beth that started, “Hey…you wanna kill our significant others?”
Fortunately, once she gave up on trying to murder us in a ravine, Diane was able to provide working directions to the hotel. Once we got there, we were instantly put to work. Nick more than me, for some reason. I don’t know if that means that my inlaws don’t trust me, or that they look at Nick as basically a pack-mule in a suit, but, at one point, while Nick was off refilling a cooler with bottled water and I was standing around doing nothing, my mother-in-law came up to me and said, “could you ask Nick to take the presents to the car when he gets back? Thanks.” I ended up helping anyway, as I felt like quite the load just standing there while the new guy did all the work.
After the ceremony and the reception (which, for some ungodly reason, was dry) we all went out to dinner (again, at Gustav’s) and made up for lost time by consuming as much alcohol as possible as quickly as possible. Bad news; Leavenworth isn’t any more interesting when drunk. Unfortunately, when we got back to the hotel, we discovered that all of the other rooms had filled up (…still no staff), mainly with people whose favorite hobby seems to be slamming doors repeatedly. So by the time we woke up this morning, we were good and ready to get the hell out of Leavenworth. Of course, one more Greyhound ride stood in our way.
While we didn’t have to put up with the World of Warcraft fanatics this time, we did get to hear the exhaustive ballad of Shanika and Rondell. Shanika was the highly animated girl who sat directly behind us and who spent her ENTIRE bus trip yelling into her cell phone to at least five different people. The mainstay of her conversations, which she felt it was very important we all hear (at one point I had my ipod a full blast and could still hear her clearly), was her relationship with a mystery man named Rondell, whom she’s planning to marry in the near future but is too shy to hold her hand. She also discussed at great length how one of her male friends is too shy to have sex with anyone because he hasn’t had sex in a long time and has, essentially, forgotten how sex works. Then there was my favorite conversation, an detailed account of the previous week’s party that everyone was “talkin’ all nasty about her” over because she apparently got mind blowingly drunk and did stupid things. Or, as she put it, “It aint’ no big deal…I just got all happy and affectionate!” My favorite line from the drinking discussion had to be one she used repeatedly; “I don’t know why people are makin’ such a big deal; I don’t ever drink. Ever. I only drink when I want to.” Thankfully, Shanika de-bussed in Moses Lake, and the bus became noticeably quiet the rest of the way to Spokane.
So that’s the story of our trip to Leavenworth; a cautionary tale, to be sure. Unless you think I’ve left something out, in which case there’s probably some place you can go to see about that….