Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom (And Whimsy)

Posted on April 2, 2025 under Wednesday’s Words of Wisdom with no comments yet

Man at work

“The best laid plans of mice and men.” Robert Burns

How I spent the first day of my vacation.

Travel these days is, well, unpredictable. There are many reasons for this, but I think one of the major contributors is the fallout from Covid. Every industry is plagued with staff shortages and when you can find staff, they are often inexperienced.

After a very busy winter, I decided that a little vacation was in order. A friend who hadn’t been south in a long time (against her better judgment (!) decided to join me.

Sun, sand, sipping pina coladas.

But before the sipping, and the sun, you first have to get to your destination. That’s where the fun began on a recent trip to the Dominican Republic.

Most of us who have done a lot of travelling, know that the days leading up to a trip are usually busy. There’s lots of last-minute things to take care of. An overactive brain, which is normally not a problem for this old geezer, led to a couple of nights of shitty sleep prior to the trip. “No sleep, Len” is not the prettiest of sights.

We had an evening flight. I was up at 5;15 a.m., my usual time, on travel day. I knew it would be a very long day but having flown to and from India (a 35-hour trip), I wasn’t too concerned. I would be just slightly crankier than usual. I took a bus from home to Stanfield airport in Halifax where I rendezvoused with my friend.

We were sitting in the departure lounge prior to the flight. My back felt unusually warm. I had just consumed a bowl of premium Tim Horton’s chili and wondered if maybe they had added extra spice. The heat persisted and then I started to wonder if I might be coming down with something which would be very bad indeed. I even posited that I might be suffering male hot flashes. I was perplexed. Just when I was about to take off my shirt, which would likely have led to my expulsion from the airport, the lady sitting directly behind me tapped me on the shoulder. She was all apologetic. She had been using a heating pad to loosen up her back before the flight and half of the heating pad had ended up on the back of my seat. Mystery solved. So grateful that it wasn’t hot flashes!

The flight itself was uneventful. My only observation was that our flight attendant seemed bored and disinterested, possibly unhappy. I have a soft spot for people who do this work. Any kind of client service work is hard. Flight attendants are not treated particularly well. When there are long flight delays or cancellations, they don’t get paid.

The arrival in Punta Cana couldn’t have gone smoother. Customs was a breeze. They didn’t even check our entry papers which we found surprising. We collected our bags at the carousel and headed for the baggage inspection area. I had some homemade granola and cookies in my suitcase and some bread and cheese in my mini backpack. I expected this to raise some alarms, and I was fully prepared to have these items absconded. We approached a large screening machine. There were three agents managing the station. They were far more interested in their cell phones than annoying passengers and didn’t even look at their screens to see what was passing through the device. I believe that a massive herd of wildebeests on their Serengeti migration, could have passed through unnoticed. In very short order we were on our bus and on our way to our resort.

It was now late, 10:15 local time, way beyond my bedtime. I had faded a few hours earlier and was now just hanging on for dear life. We entered a massive, open-air lobby. Happy travelers were partying hard at the far end of the lobby. We were in the middle of a group of approximately 40 travellers. Twenty of them were in front of us and they were a group. A wedding party, perhaps? It was extremely warm and muggy. It didn’t take long for the mosquitoes to find us. I’m not sure if it was the mosquitoes or those nasty hot flashes, but I could feel my temperature rising.

The check-in counter was long and serving these 40 or so weary vacationers was one young man. No. He wasn’t old enough to be a man. Honestly, he looked no older than 16 and it is quite possible that he had just begun shaving. He was in “way over his head”. The party in front of us was trying to rearrange their room assignments so that they could be closer to each other. It wasn’t difficult to detect the frustration levels of all parties escalating. The line in front of us didn’t move for half an hour. At this point, a second desk clerk appeared on the scene, much to everyone’s joy. Things started to move but it was still close to 90 minutes before we reached the front of the line.

We got our wristbands (which double as your room key) and were heading out to one of the trolleys to take us to our room. We were just pulling out when the desk clerk came running through the lobby. He had forgotten to give us back our passports.

The concierge dropped us off at our building and escorted us to our door, a “tip worthy” gesture. My friend tapped her wristband on the door. Nothing. She tapped again. Same result. The concierge adjusted her wristband and still no open sesame. We tried mine and it worked like a charm. It was now just past midnight, local time. This lad had been on the go 20 hours and my patience was razor thin. We turned on the lights and discovered that there was a convention of mosquitoes ™ in our room. Of course, we were too tired to do an actual count but eyeballing it, there were certainly 100. They were everywhere. It was disgusting.

We expressed our alarm to the concierge and he immediately got on his phone to get maintenance to come over and spray the room. Some of the lights in the room didn’t work and two of the very tiny dresser drawers wouldn’t open. They were tiny drawers fit for a midget. I can’t put it any other way. We were infuriated (pissed). The thought of having our room sprayed just before going to bed was repulsive. The concierge left and we waited half an hour. No maintenance man. We called the front desk, and they explained that our guy couldn’t find any spray and was checking with a neighbouring resort. Surely, we weren’t the first guests to ever encounter this issue in a place with 1,000 rooms.

At 1:00 the spray man showed up. We were clinging to exhaustion and our sanity. “You will have to leave the room for 20 minutes while I spray.” Fearing bodily harm, we suggested that this man leave our room immediately.

When we were finally shutting things down, my friend accidentally turned off the overhead fan, a move that could have possibly endangered her life! I asked her (politely) to turn the fan back on. There were several switches and a pad near the door. She hit the pad by mistake, and we lost all power. We spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get the power back on. My friend got a star for figuring it out.

You’ve heard of “Dancing With The Stars”?

The sequel could be called “Sleeping With The Mosquitoes.”

Have a good weekend.

P.S. Three days after our arrival another group of happy tourists arrived at our resort. There were about 40 of them… plus or minus 1! There were seven (7) desk clerks on duty and all of them were old enough to shave and hold a valid driver’s license.