Christmas With the Clampetts

This year's Christmas was a disaster, and it's all Theo's fault. Let me explain.

Tom and I decided that we would spend our first Christmas in Seattle somewhere else. Gathering with one or both of our families presented a number of difficulties due to the widespread locations of our family members and anyway we thought it might be fun to buck tradition and take a week long trip to Napa Valley and spend the holidays blitzed. This was half of a good idea.

The first problem we ran into was the dog. Everybody we know locally was, of course, busy over the holidays and their plans did not include pampering somebody else's old, grouchy Lhasa Apso. To board her would have required two things: forethought, and a huge wad of cash. So I brilliantly searched the internet for a B&B in Napa that would allow dogs and found one: the Hillcrest Inn.

(Yes, I am taking a risk giving the name. You'll see later why it's not that big a risk.)

Our first night was spent in one of those typical hotels found along the interstate: fair-priced, no frills, clean and functional. It was just a stop-over to break up the 12 hour drive to Napa so we weren't looking for anything fancy. Which is a good thing because about 30 minutes after we checked in, Theo barfed all over the carpet. Not only that, she insisted she wanted to a) walk through it and then b) take it back, if you know what I mean. So Tom held on to her while I cleaned up the mess, and Theo was snarling and grousing the entire time in her typical demon-like manner. She is so grouchy and pissy these days that I thought nothing of, after cleaning up the barf, reaching out to clean the rest of it off her face. Theo had other ideas in mind, apparently, because when I tried to do this she bit me. HARD.

Chaos ensued during which I screeched, Tom did his best to discipline a snarling ball of canine terror and Theo escaped under a chair where we gladly left her. She and I were not on speaking terms for a good five minutes, until her brain cell forgot what had happened and she came back out, fluffed herself up, and looked at us like, "Hey guys! What's to eat?"

That was one of the better nights of our vacation.

We arrived the next night at the B&B. It was up on a hillside (hence the name) and quite remote, so there were no lights to show us much of the grounds. We pulled up to our room and found the key in the door as promised. We saw nobody else when we arrived; in fact, it would be two days before we met our hostess.

Our room was monstrously small and horribly laid out. To make up for this, the owner had thoughtfully crammed every nook and cranny, every inch of wall space, with clutter. Our room was called the Shangri La (or the "Shanga La" as the wood-carved sign on the door read and nobody apparently saw fit to correct). Now, I never really thought much about the meaning of "Shangri-La" or if it was even a real place. But I was fairly certain it was not located in Florida. However, our hostess seemed to think it was, based on the many palm-tree-associated accoutrement foundjunking up the place. We had our pick of tacky palm tree lamps, for example. She also imagined Shangri-la was inhabited by parrots and monkeys, many stuffed versions of which could be found hanging from the ceiling.

Another highlight of the room, which Tom was lucky enough to discover, was a mound of damp, used towels in the corner behind the door. Further inspection showed they were damp with what appeared to be blood. Tom, with a look of severe distress, gathered them up and threw them outside the front door.

There was no phone, no cell phone signal, and certainly no internet. We were completely isolated. We noted it was unlikely there was anybody to hear us scream, should screaming at some point come into the picture on this vacation, for whatever reason.
The bathroom seemed to double as a storage facility for the grounds. In there we found unhung paintings (mercifully so) wrapped in garbage bags. Cabinets stuffed with cleaning solutions that had grown rusty with disuse. Piles and piles of old towels that reminded me of the donations we used to receive at the ASPCA for the homeless dogs to make beds out of. But the charm of the bathroom did not end there, oh no. There were huge patches of mold growing on the walls and around the toilet, and, mysteriously, the left-hand knobs of all the cabinets and fixtures had been removed.

Tom and I decided that really it couldn’t be this bad. We were tired and grumpy after a long day of driving and we were sure the light of day would show us beautiful scenic vistas of rolling hills covered in vineyards and a generally more cheerful outlook. So we removed the twelve or so throw pillows depicting various parrots and palm trees from the bed and crawled gingerly in.

But a good night’s sleep was not a part of our hostess’ vision of Shangri-La. For one thing, the linoleum in the bathroom had grown warped to the point that you could not shut the bathroom door without giving it a mighty shove, which allowed the wood to scrape over a hump of linoleum and then slip back into the doorframe with a loud BANG. The loud BANG naturally woke up the other of us, and Theo was so distressed by the loud BANG that whenever we so much as stepped toward the bathroom she would flee under the bed.
Our rest was also interrupted by the curious folks who shared our cabin. I had deliberately booked what was described as a “charming, rustic cabin set away from the main house” so we could have romantic privacy. What the description did not say is that the cabin was divided into two rooms. The people who had the other room were, we surmised, working for the FBI on a very special case involving either wild animals or dead bodies. They would arrive at the room around 11pm and would open and shut the doors of their minivan at least fifteen times either to let out all the secret animals or because they suffered from OCD - we were not sure. Then around 7am they would repeat the process in reverse, crossing the threshold of our door several times (each one of which emitted a new round of growling and barking from Theo) and opening and closing the minivan doors with religious dedication.

One morning, unable to sleep anyway and overcome with curiosity, I pulled aside the dank, dusty curtain of the one window in the room and watched as the couple emerged carrying a huge cage-like object between them. It had a domed top and was covered with a large towel. It was about the size of a very large trunk or animal cage, except it wasn’t shaped like an animal cage. They maneuvered this thing into the backseat of the van, and then the woman crawled in with it and they slammed all the doors shut. I watched the woman in the van lift the towel (but not at an angle for me to see what was inside, of course) and talk to whatever was inside it. Then she got out of the van, carefully slamming the door, and went back inside. A few minutes later the couple re-emerged, taking care to jabber loudly as they passed our door, and once again slammed the doors of the van before taking off, not to be seen again till 11pm that night.
The first morning, we awoke to realize that it was not, after all, our being tired and grumpy that made the place seem like a dump. It was a dump. The morning light, what little of it came through that one window, showed the dirt even more clearly. Getting showered and dressed involved a two-person process where one of us held the dog to prevent her running under the bed while the other one attempted to close the bathroom door as softly as possible, always resulting in that big BANG that made us all jump even though we knew it was coming, kind of like the reaction to a jack-in-the-box or that puff of air they used to use to test your eyes for glaucoma.
To be fair, the view from our porch - several rungs of which were missing and, instead, had random pieces of wicker furniture shoved in the holes - was lovely. But that’s because it looked out onto someone else’s property.

A tour of the grounds consisted of more of the same. Rusted out cars. Pieces of farm equipment abandoned mid-project. For some odd reason there were disconnected hoses absolutely everywhere. A lake-like gathering of murky water. Junk piled high around the main house - huge slabs of wood, old plastic toys, many items that couldn’t be identified.

When we were away from the Clampetts’ we had a lovely time. Napa is beautiful country, even in winter when the grape vines are bare, and visiting the wineries is a lot of fun, and not just because you get progressively more tipsy. They are each individualistic, housed in spectacular buildings and Sterling even had a tram ride up to their winery that made the whole thing feel like Disneyland for grownups. I drank so much wine - and by “so much” I mean only slightly more than my 2 glass limit - that I took to carrying tums in my purse so that I could keep sampling.

But every evening, after the wineries closed and we’d had dinner at some cute little restaurant in town, our hearts fell as we climbed the hill to that awful place. We’d walk in the door, sigh, coax Theo out from under the bed - she was growing more and more dingy from God knows what under there - and settle in for another night of minivan banging, door slamming fun.

On Christmas morning we were invited to the Big House for breakfast. The Big House had one large main room where guests could gather. One wall was entirely windows and looked out over the vineyards. If one focused on this, that is, someone else’s property, one could imagine a luxurious experience. But if you allowed your eyes to focus on the musty inside it was a different story.

The big room was as cluttered as ours and similarly dissuaded you from touching anything for fear of what you’d get on your hands. The breakfast was surprisingly good and it was served by our hostess, whom we met now for the first time. She was a heavyset woman who wore a sweater, skirt, bare legs and furry boots that reached halfway up her calves. She would come and go through a door at the far end of the room that shut off the guests’ world with that of her family’s. At one point one of the family crossed the line to get something from the refrigerator located randomly in the center of the big room where we were eating. He was a large, hairy man, with a beard and wild hair. He wore a flannel shirt, pajama bottoms and one sock. The other bloated, hairy foot was bare. I was intrigued by this choice. Perhaps one sock had come off and he hadn’t noticed? Or in the midst of putting on his socks he was distracted and never returned to the task? Who knows, but it did make one wonder what he wore on days that were not major holidays.

Like the Clampetts, our hosts were extremely kind people. This was the way they lived; they outfitted their guest rooms in the same manner as their own home, and while it was miles apart from the way I would want to live, it was still some sort of an effort to make the place homey to their way of thinking.

We endured three more nights of BANG and SLAM and tiptoeing around the mold in our room before we decided to throw in the mildewy towel. Enough was enough. As much fun as we had when we left the place, coming back to it each night was such a killjoy that at this point we just wanted to be home where we weren’t afraid to touch anything and could turn a full circle in the middle of the room without whacking into a dangling parrot. We wanted to be able to use the bathroom without having to engage in a full military campaign of strategy involving corraling the dog and stepping gingerly in the spots that looked fairly mold-free in order to balance gingerly on the toilet.

Theo had also had enough. We didn’t know what went on while we were away during the day - and frankly tried not to dwell on it - but when we got home it was always to find Theo trembling on the bed or underneath it where sometimes, for extra fun, she’d throw up.
That night, as we listened to the weird minivan couple engage in their routine of door slamming, we plotted our escape. The catch was that there was a one-week cancellation policy, and the last night, being a weekend night, was more expensive than the others, so we didn’t know if we’d be able to get that money back without a fight. We whispered urgently to each other in the musty bed as Theo bellowed from under it at the crazy minivan couple trudging back and forth with their mysterious load. The thing was, as soon as we told her we were going to check out a day early, we were rather afraid we’d end up buried under one of the many junk heaps on the property.

Well, more realistically, it was that neither of us liked confrontation. Tom tended to babble uncomfortably and provide way too much information in a hearty attempt to save everybody’s feelings to the point that the person being confronted had no idea that that’s what was happening; and I tended to be so brutally forceful and to the point just to get it over with that I just managed to piss people off and solve nothing.

The next morning we marched purposefully to the main house. “So I’ll tell her that my best friend was going to be leaving town next week,” Tom babbled as we crossed the graveled drive, ”but now he’s leaving town tomorrow so we have to get home and also that my other friend is in the hospital with leukemia and I have to get back before -”

“No,” I interjected. “Too much information and, incidentally, all false. Never tell a lie if you can avoid it because that’s the surest way to be caught.” Tom really sucks at deception. He’s way too kind and honest. Not me. I know how to deceive because I am an expert at doing what I can to get my own way, especially if getting my own way involves escaping crazy hillbillies without getting murdered and buried under rusted farm equipment. “We’ll just say we’re leaving early and leave it at that. If she puts up a fight, then we mention the mold.”

Tom looked alarmed. “Do we really want to bring out the big guns so soon?” he asked, grabbing my arm to hold me back. But it was too late to discuss it further because we were at the front door.

“Hello?” I called cautiously. The door between the main room and the family’s part of the house was open, revealing it’s mysterious interior which was, naturally, covered in mounds of clutter.

Our hostess came out calling, “Come in, come in!”

“We’re leaving early,” I said, just like that.

“Okay, I’ll credit you the last night,” she said, just like that. ”How was everything? Were you comfortable?”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” we both gushed like total idiots, grinning and babbling about the lovely accomodations.

“I hope we’ll see you again,” she said kindly.

“Oh ABSOLUTELY!” Tom trilled as we slammed the door behind us and exchanged a look.

On our way home we stopped at that same hotel along the interstate. “Wow,” I said when we entered our room. “This is so NICE!” There was all this bare space and the room was so CLEAN!
“This is the best hotel room EVER,” Tom agreed.

And I’m fairly sure Theo shared our sentiment because not only did she not barf, but she stayed on top of the bed all night.

We are home safely, now, and already the memories of that room have dimmed. The wine rack is nicely stocked, and we spent a BANG-free night in our own bed. And we learned a valuable lesson: no matter how stressful or expensive it can be to do what you need to do to spend the holidays with family, spending the night stranded in an airport in Cleveland trying to get to them is still preferable to Christmas with the Clampetts.