Umm...Erica?

I left just in time to see the long sunset from the turnpike, casting the leafless trees in silhouette and looking lovely and kind of lonesome above the long flat stretches of land between Pittsburgh and Ohio. As I passed Lordstown, OH, I wondered what it’s like to be a dog there. Passing Ohio turnpike exits for Toledo and Ann Arbor, MI, I learned, in between French-language songs, that St. Boniface is Manitoba’s Francophone capital—knowledge that I had somehow navigated my whole life without. Here’s a question—how come people fluent in Spanish who grow up in the southern U.S. speak English with American accents, but people who appear on the St. Boniface radio station—people who, I assume, grew up in Manitoba—have funny accents that are distinctly funnier than those of regular non-Quebecois Canadians? Huh? (This is not a question of why Quebecois sound like they can’t speak English—the answer to that is because they can’t, the result of a conscious choice they all make and goal they all have.)

I stopped for the night when, just having entered Indiana territory, the rain began freezing on my windshield—something I’d never before seen. I pulled off the turnpike through an automated tollbooth. I saw signs for several chains, all of which I’d previously heard of. I decided to turn left, toward the Super 8 and the Holiday Inn Express, as opposed to right, where lay the Holiday Inn and another more expensive-sounding hotel. As I reached the intersection, I saw on my right a Motor Inn (or something similar) and, realizing that it hadn’t even warranted space on the lodgings-at-this-exit sign, pictured the myriad visitors who no doubt already knew about and chose that hotel in preference to the name brands, thus rendering a sign on the highway unnecessary—namely, cockroaches. This thought made me confident in my decision to choose either the Express or the 8. I came to the Express first, and, looking down the road and seeing only pitch blackness, choose it I did. I walked into the lobby and saw an eating area that looked surprisingly non-express. This made me wondered if the Express was ritzier than I had anticipated. Then I saw the pool and knew I’d been had. What’s “express” about a pool? What do they have at the non-Express Holiday Inn? Maybe the Express is actually better. Perhaps the normal one lacks the quick service and straight, easy-to-navigate hallways of the Express, instead possessing a stiff-jointed staff walking the labyrinthine halls of a layout reminiscent of the hedges in “The Shining.” Maybe that’s why it’s worth the $100 the clerk took off of my credit card as I took deep breaths—approximately 3.3333333 times as much as the price I saw advertised at some roadside motel a few hours back. Maybe that’s the problem—I’d entered a hotel when I needed a motel. Is the 8 a motel? I should have shopped around, but, as I said, it was beginning to freezing rain, and the 8 was well camouflaged even, I assume, for a car that didn’t have a second windshield made of ice. Oh well, at least I can get some laps in tomorrow, I thought. The water must be chilled by an expensive, high-tech cooling machine, to expedite my swim and thus earn the basin inclusion in this temple of temporal attention?