Welcome to Salem, MA. Your room is cursed.

A year ago from right now, I was sleeping on the hardest bed known to mankind in Salem, Massachusetts. There is joy in the journey, right? Partially true in this case. We laughed a whole lot on the drive from Canada to Massachusetts, but it was a day from H-E-double hockey sticks. Most of this will be directly from my journal entry that I wrote that night...It's long so skip down to the paragraph that starts with, "We made it back to the motel..." if you don't have all day.

Wow...where to begin with this day. We woke up early to exercise and then got on the road with the hopes of arriving in Salem around 5:30pm. A few hours into the drive, we realized that our back tire had a slow leak. We stopped at a gas station to fill it up and then drove to the Syracuse airport 45 miles away to exchange the rental.
Leslie went to hand her credit card to the cashier only to realize that it was missing. We think it must have fallen out of her pocket while she was putting air in the tire. We went to grab a piece of pizza at New York's finest Sbarro Pizza (emotional eating...and only option) and Leslie canceled her credit card. An hour and a half later, our new car was ready and we were on our way again.
We were still in good spirits and enjoying the scenery. Three hours later, just outside of Boston, Leslie got pulled over. $200 ticket. We finally arrived in Salem, still laughing. Turns out the cute/historic part of Salem is surrounded by a ghetto. Turns out we are staying a little less than a mile outside of historic Salem...in the ghetto. Not at all what I expected. We got a little lost (yes even with GPS) but finally found our motel and it is scary. It's called the Clipper Ship Inn and it is terrifying. The woman who checked us in literally looked like a witch. There was a fat cat sitting in the lobby...we're talking the stuff of horror movies.

The witch was pretty nice though. She had a German accent. She told us there was a restaurant down the street and we went there because it was 8:00pm and cold/dark/scary. Everyone there looked like witches. Our waitress could have been Elphaba from Wicked. She was very nice. There was an older woman all by herself wearing a Halloween sweater who kept staring at me. And another waitress had a large crystal around her neck.

We made it back to the motel only to find that we had been locked out. The only lock on the door is a push button on the handle. No deadbolt. It will be a miracle if we are alive in the morning. Apparently you are only supposed to push the button when you are still INSIDE and it locks automatically when you leave. I went to the office to ask for help and there was a new witch there with a black cat behind the counter. She was rather annoyed when I told her that we were locked out of room 140 because I was tearing her away from the 1982 techno David Hasselhoff show which she was very engrossed in. The phone rang and she was rude to them then she came back to me and chewed me out for locking the door.

She went on and on about how you aren't supposed to push the button. Haven't you ever stayed at a motel before? Why would you do that? You just have to close the door. BLAH BLAH BLAH. By this time (at least 13 minutes) I'm thinking that I'm the only idiot on the planet to have ever made such a stupid mistake and it must require calling a locksmith or 9-1-1 to get in when she says, "This is the third night in a row that the people in room 140 have locked themselves out of that room. It must be cursed." Right as she said CURSED the black cat leaps up on the counter a stares me down. No lie. She continued to talk in circles so I finally had to put my mean hat on and give her a piece of my mind. Which prompted her to follow me back to our cursed quarters, stick a key in the handle, turn the lock, and let us in. 60 seconds round trip.