adventuring

Today I fled work as soon as I could and hopped on a train to have lunch My Way.

Then Izzy, Janice and I (the Adventurers) went hunting for an abandoned hotel that apparently contained suitcases from the 1950s. It smelt old - what a perfect place to adventure into! But the Lady who might open the gate and let us in was not there (though she had left fresh slippers on the porch). We contemplated throwing a bag of french fries into the lobby as an excuse to go in and retrieve it but we knew trespassing was wrong. Our only choice was to go for lunch ourselves, while waiting for the Lady to return. That, or stomp on a pile of bricks. We chose lunch.

At lunch we invented a new form of pictionary involving a bowl of remnants of grass jelly. It was remarkably simple and brought us back to basics. After slogging through my tedious storytelling (Ugly Betty's tragic season finale) we headed back to el hotel to find the gate creepily open.

We crept in. There, in the back room, was the Lady. She told us we could go upstairs but we had to pay first. This ancient and crumbling thing was trying to make money off us (the hotel not the Lady) when we might well fall through the cardboard floor and die. We found no 50-year-old suitcases. Instead we witnessed lots of old old furniture, various rusty electric fans, and big empty Pepsi bottles on a table.

The Lady told us that everything was on sale, even that antique bathtub and the birdcage hanging above it. The table, and that chair, those were for sale too, and if we wanted that cupboard we could get a taxi and take it home with us for $50. Everything was going for $50. Except books. Books could go for 50c.

I contemplated the purchase of a "lift under maintenance" sign but she offered it to us at 10 times more than I was willing to pay. I guess perhaps she thought we were the sort of people who might buy a piece of the wall for 50 bucks. We would not really do that because the old creaky building might have been cursed - we all got itchy red blobs on our skin that matched the curtains on its windows.

It would be a fantastically cool place to film something, though.