Crossing That One off My Life's To-Do List

This weekend I slept in my car. I slept in my car like a bum, a crazy person, an aspiring actress who packs her things and heads to Hollywood to get a job at In and Out Burger while praying that she'll make it big someday, oh, someday.

I didn't sleep in the car alone. I slept in the car with my mother. We were in Maine, in a parking lot of a hotel that attracts truckers, and we were there because of an online reservation that went awry.

We went to look at apartments this weekend. It was going to be an easy enough trip--start out on Friday, get there late, sleep, do a whirlwind apartment-viewing on Saturday and possibly Sunday morning, then drive home and be done with it. My mother made the hotel reservation because she lives in a place that has fast internet, unlike out here in the country where we connect to the internet at a maddening 24k.

When we arrived in our hotel in Maine the man behind the counter looked at us strangely. "I don't have any record of your reservation," he said.

My mother told me to go out to the car and get her receipt, which she'd printed off and brought with her.

And I did. On my way back inside, I unfolded the piece of paper and saw that my mother had accidentally made the reservation for next weekend, not this one.

It was 11:45 PM. We'd just spent the last ten hours driving, and two of those hours were marred by us screaming Pussies! Pussies! PUSSIES! at the people of Massachusetts who turned on their blinkers and would not go above 45 mph during a thunderstorm that was terrific, yes, but did not warrant that kind of emergency driving. That had made us tired. Reading that my mother had botched the reservations made me even more tired. And so I trudged back inside and handed over the piece of paper.

My mother was not pleased with herself, but, like a logical person, she figured everything would be okay. All we needed to do was make a reservation in the here and now, get ourselves a room, and pass out.

The man behind the counter informed us he had no rooms. In fact, no one in town had rooms. He'd called around and everything was booked. And not just for tonight. Tomorrow, too.

"Sorry," he said. He shrugged and went back to shuffling papers so he could avoid a potential scene.

However, my mother and I are not scene makers. We merely went back outside and sat in the car. On my way out, I'd nabbed a few maps, and I started calling 411 for hotel information in cities that were close. Everything was booked, though, and one of the girls I got on the phone told me the unfortunate news: everything-everything was booked.

"I've been on the phone trying to find people rooms all night," she said. "There's nothing out there. All the hotels in the state are full. Actually, everything from Portsmouth, New Hampshire up to Bangor is full. I'm so sorry. There's nothing we can do."

Apparently we had picked a very popular weekend to come to Maine. Apparently half of America had decided to plop itself on the coast for those two days I needed to find an apartment.

"What are we going to do?" my mother asked. She's not one for these types of gray areas. She gets nerved up about traveling, about having things go wrong.

I didn't know what we were going to do. What was there to do? I had a sudden vision of my mother and I sitting at a corner booth in Denny's until 9 AM when we were meeting the real estate girl. We would drink an awful lot of coffee. We would eat an awful lot of pie. We would show up for our appointment looking grizzled and smelling of late-night fried food.

I didn't know what we were going to do about sleep that night, but I did know that we needed something for the next night. I pulled out of the hotel parking lot and drove to another hotel parking lot, one that was likely to have some kind of wireless internet I could filch.

And that's exactly what I did. I stole some WiFi and hooked up to Orbitz, found that there were only two available rooms left in the entire town, and those were at the EconoLodge, which my mother and I scoffed at when making our original reservations. But now it was a different story. I wanted to kiss the owners of the EconoLodge for somehow having a room that I could reserve for the next night so I wouldn't have to spend two nights without a bed.

But after we made that reservation it became very clear that we had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and absolutely no options.

"We're going to have to sleep in the car," my mother said. "We're vagrants!"

And that's exactly what we did, and that's exactly what we were.

I pulled into another hotel parking lot, one that was home to several big rigs that had parked for the night. We drove around several times, trying to find a spot that was nearish the lights (to discourage any and all shanking that might occur by crazed murderers who were roving the Maine streets at night) and simultaneously away from the lights (so we could attempt to sleep like normal people). After we found a spot, my mother and I rearranged the luggage so we could recline our seats all the way back (thank you for that small mercy, Honda Civic). I struggled into my pajama bottoms and wadded up a t-shirt for a pillow. I used a hoodie for a blanket. I stretched out as best I could but found that--because I am so tall--my feet dangled at an awkward position, and I could never get them comfortable. This would be what kept me up most of the night. My mother, however, had brought herself a sleeping pill because she knew that her drinking caffeine to stay awake for the drive would screw with her attempt to fall asleep after the drive was over. She took that sleeping pill and was down for the count within the first hour. It took me much, much longer.

The next morning we were faced with the biggest challenge: somehow making ourselves look presentable to the people who had the power to rent me an apartment, and do this despite having spent the night in the car and despite having not showered.

That was when we went to Denny's. We stuffed clothes and makeup and hair things into a bag and sneaked into the bathroom as quickly as we could. My mother had serious qualms about what the other Denny's customers would think about two ladies who went into the bathroom with a bag full of things and came out with new clothes on a few minutes later. "They're going to think we're homeless," she said.

"We're going to buy breakfast," I told her. "Homeless people can't afford to buy breakfast. No one will think anything of it."

I did, however, feel pretty skeevy and gross and guilty as I washed my face in the Denny's bathroom sink.

No one really noticed us, though, and we did get big breakfasts (with extra bacon for our troubles). And the rest of the time in Maine was pretty decent. I toured several apartments I liked but found one I fell in love with and got quite giddy over as soon as I stepped inside. We're just waiting for the credit and background checks to go through before I am approved and before I can load up some cars and make the big move.

And I feel a little less stressed now, a little less on edge now that things have been put in motion. And I'm starting to compile a list of things I really like about Maine, and that list makes me feel a little less stressed, too. On top of that list is, of course, the proximity to the ocean and the fact that grocery stores in Maine have full-blown liquor aisles and full-blown wine aisles. That's right--grocery stores in Maine sell bottles of Absolut Peach alongside produce, deli meats, and cheese. Thank you, Maine. Thank you.