Stop Making Me Laugh Or I'll Pee My Pants! Go Back! I Lost My Shoe! Trip Report!

[MICKEY4EVER!]

Are you sure you weren't at the Quality Inn in
Sevierville, Tennessee, Lisa?

 

[mickeystoontown]

After a not so restful night, I was up and at 'em at 7:30 a.m. I woke John up and we tried to find the local weather on television. We found the Weather Channel but when it came time to do the local weather, it gave the weather in Orlando (wishing we were there), Boston, Memphis and several other places. Nothing for Hot Springs or even anywhere near Hot Springs.

We aren't big breakfast eaters but we were a little hungry. I looked through the folder that was on the table. The hotel had room service and it also had a restaurant. After looking at the prices, we knew we weren't eating anything from the Arlington. A half a grapefruit was $3.50. One egg was $3.75. No thank you!

I had bought both of us University of Louisiana at Monroe t-shirts to wear to the diamond dash. Figured we should look like a team. They had short sleeves but I had brought jackets for us just in case it was cool. John dozed on and off while I took a shower.

The bathroom was smallish. When I closed the door (which I had to really push to get closed), I noticed hair behind the door on the wall and in the corner. Not a lot, just enough to notice. There had also been some sheet rock repair done behind the door and instead of smoothing out the sheet rock mud, they had just gobbed it on and painted over it. There was absolutely no counterspace around the sink. Just enough room for a little glass in the corner. Above the toilet, was a little narrow shelf but it wasn't wide enough to put anything big on. The wall corner below the sink had a chunk out of it. The ceiling had a crack in it and there were ladybugs in the corner.

There was no bathtub in the room but I knew that ahead of time. I never ever take baths in hotel bathtubs. I'm not sitting in a hotel bathtub. That's just plain gross! There was a shower stall with the old timey crystally looking door. It had a magnetic latch so you had to shut it pretty hard. The shower head came about even with my forehead. I am 5'5" so that isn't very high. Since there's no tub, there weren't faucets meaning that the shower spray started as soon as you turned the knob. I don't know about you but when I am unfamiliar with how hot water is, I turn the knob in the middle. Don't do that at the Arlington! It'll spray you with cold water. I had to turn it almost all the way around on the last hot setting to get hot water. There was just a little soap tray in the shower. No other place to sit your shampoo or conditioner or anything other than the floor.

By the time I had gotten out of the shower, John was drinking his Starbucks coffee and looking out the window in his underwear. There's a coffee pot in the room and they supply Starbucks coffee packages. At least that's something positive about the room. I pointed out to John that even though we were on the 5th floor, people could still see him. He asked me how and I pointed to the mountain promenade just across the way. He pulled the curtain shut.

I told John about the shower head being so low and how I had sprayed myself with cold water. He said that's why he puts his washcloth over the shower head before turning on the water. Smart man.

While we were talking, I received a text message from the Diamond Dash people asking if we were getting excited. It also told us how we needed to get our bicycle, unicycle or scooter tires pumped up and our skateboard or rollerblade wheels oiled. Ummm, when I first entered the contest, it said that we couldn't used modes of transportation other than public transportation. We looked at each other and said, there's no way we are going to keep up with people on bicycles, scooters or skates. Still, we were willing to give it a try.

John went into the bathroom to take his shower and he stuck his head out and asked if I saw how yucky the bathroom was. I told him yes I did.

I received another text message from the Diamond Dash people. It gave more details. We would be receiving text messages with clues. We would have to get to a certain point in the fastest time possible. When we got to that place, we had to check in via text message in order to receive another clue. If we didn't know where the place was, we could either receive a hint or skip it. If we chose either of those options, we would lose points and the series of clues would be messed up. The race was set to last an hour and a half. This was sooooo not a typical scavenger hunt and I was getting confused just reading the directions/details of the process.

When John got out of the shower, I read the text message to him. He and I made the decision to just skip the whole darn thing. It made me pretty upset that we had come all the way to Hot Springs and spent several hundred dollars just to get/stay there and we weren't going to participate.

My Mama has this really warped sense of the internet even though she doesn't own a computer. She is scared to death that something is a scam, somebody's trying to get your information, etc. She was leary of us going to Hot Springs in the first place. John and I decided we'd simply tell her that there were so many people at the place that we knew we'd never keep up so we bowed out. That wasn't a fib!

Since we weren't going to do the diamond dash, we figured we'd go to the huge flea market that John's parents had told us about. We also wanted to walk downtown some more since most of the shops had been closed the night before. And, I wanted to drive out to Lake Ouachita State Park and have a look around.

Once we were ready, I grabbed my purse, camera and our jackets and we were off. I told John that'd we'd stop by the front desk and complain about the room but when we got downstairs, there were five or six families at the front desk and I didn't want to stand around and wait.

Al Capone's car was on display in the lobby. He had his car painted like the Chicago Police cars so it wouldn't stand out when he rode around Chicago. The back window folded down so he could shoot out the back if he needed to. The side windows were about an inch thick so they'd stop bullets. He also had a special steel plate put in the top of the car. It was pretty neat. He had the car brought to Hot Springs by rail car. I took a few pictures:

These are pictures of the lobby. While the lobby was big, it was crowded with so many tables and chairs.

The bar:

The raised dining area:

The band area:

Staircase:

A couple of daytime outside pictures:

We walked down the block to the nasty parking building. Have I mentioned how I hated that parking building? Anyway, we had to pass the Aquarium on the way to the parking building and we still needed to get John's dad's sign but they didn't open until 10:30 a.m. and it was only 9:15 a.m. I made another mental note that we had to come back and get the sign.

As soon as we got to the car, John started looking at the tires again. Gosh darn it! He was still insisting that the back passenger tire wasn't a new tire. It looked like a new tire to me. Maybe it was just dusty from sitting in their storage area. Nothing was going to satisfy John until we went to Walmart and had them look at it. So off we went to Walmart.

I waited in the car while John went in. He came out and told me to pull under an awning in the parking lot so they could come out and look at the tires. A Walmart lady came out and looked at the tires and asked for our paperwork from the recent purchase as well as our May purchase. She matched up DOT numbers (had no idea that tires had DOT numbers but they do) and told John that the front passenger tire was the new one and the back passenger tire was the one we bought in May. John asked if they had rotated the tires or something. She walked around the car again and looked at more DOT numbers and the paperwork and said it didn't look like it. After about 15 minutes of John and the lady circling the car like vultures circling a dead carcass, they decided that the new tire had been put on the front because the car was front wheel drive. That didn't sit too well with John because he likes things to match. When he finally got in the car, he said he was going to come back home and change them around. Whatever!

I drove over to the flea market on the unmatched tires. The place was pretty big and smelled like a flea market....musty...but I like flea markets. You never know if you might find a treasure or two. We started out going to the right. The place was set up in little booths and had a couple of central cashiers. Some vendors were in their booths, some were not. It made it kind of hard when you couldn't find a price on something and there was nobody to ask. Several vendors said they'd work with you on the prices.

The further/deeper we got into the booths on the right, the junkier the stuff got. I found one Disney/McDonald's glass that I liked and one Disney/Welch's glass that I liked. I held on to them as we walked around. My cell phone buzzed and it was a text message from the Diamond Dash people reminding us that we could check in at Noon. I just dropped the phone in my purse and kept on looking. Lots of booths were closed up but it didn't really matter 'cause their stuff looked really junky anyway.

We worked our way to the left side of the building where I found a few more Disney/McDonald's glasses but they were 50 cents more than the one I found earlier. However, I found one that I didn't already have. (the one I found earlier, I had already but still wanted it) I traded out the glasses and we moved on. It took us a pretty good while to make it to all of the booths. Just as I we were finishing up, I found a Disney/Welch's glass that was exactly like the one I had earlier. It was 75 cents cheaper. I traded it out and we were ready to go.

Wait, somewhere along the way, I found an old aluminum ashtray that had been in one of the bathhouses. It hadn't been used at all and it was just $2.00 so I picked it up too. I thought it was neat because the bathhouse had been closed for a long time. Just before checking out, I got another message from the diamond dash people. Another reminder that we could check in soon. We paid for our stuff and walked out to the car.

Of course, John had to look at the tire and shake his head. He told me to come look at the front tire. It had white paper on the treads. It was the paper that comes on a new tire. It was on there the whole time and we never saw it because we hadn't parked where it was visible. Had we seen it before, the mystery of "I know that's not a new tire on the back" would have been solved a lot earlier.

I told John that we should drive by the Convention Center and at least see how crowded it was. If there weren't too many people maybe we should check in and give it a try anyway. He said that sounded okay to him. We turned the corner and saw a sea of red shirts. They must give you red shirts when you get there because everybody had them on. There were bicycles and skooters propped up everywhere and people on rollerblades. They were serious about this thing. I drove down the block and the line continued on and on and one.

After about two blocks, I pulled into a parking lot and asked John what he wanted to do. Did he want to at least check in and get out t-shirt? But, then, we'd have to get in that over a block long line just to get a shirt. While we were sitting there, even more people were getting in line. There were also lots of people walking by with their shirts thrown over their shoulders getting in their cars and leaving. We figured they had planned on doing the race on foot too and were bowing out. Which is exactly what we decided to do. As we drove by, I tried to take pictures of the crowd. You can't really tell just how many people there were.

Now that we had decided to bail out, we realized we were hungry. We drove down Central Avenue until we saw an Applebee's. We hadn't eaten at Applebee's in a long time and it sounded good. I ordered the sampler plate and an entree and a house salad. John ordered the margarita chicken and a house salad. Everything was good, we just couldn't eat it all.

****Up next, a ride out to the state park.

 

[MICKEY4EVER!]

Glad you guys figured out the mystery of the new tire!

Yeah, I don't blame you for not going to the race. I could tell there was A LOT of people from your pictures. Wow! Too bad the line was so long you didn't get your shirt. You should have gotten SOMETHING for all of your troubles.

Yay on the Disney glasses! I bought a set of McDonald's Disney glasses at a yard sale for 2.00 (fifty cents a piece). They were for the 25th anniversary.

 

[Cameo818]

I think DH and I would have bowed out of the dash ourselves...that's just too many people and it sounds so disorganized! The frustrating thing is that the organizers of the event most likely were thrilled with the crowds and called it a success. I almost wish they would have sent you a survey afterwards so you could have told them what's what!

Love Disney glasses, especially the ones from McDonalds. We have quite the eclectic set ourselves.

 

[aaaateamsgrandma]

EEK to the Arlington. I will be amazed if you stay there another night. Don and I would have chucked the dash too. I'm thinking I would be writing the Convention people a letter. They pretty much misrepresented the whole thing. Shame on them. They did draw a lot of people down there tho. So for them it worked.

As to John standing in the window in his tightywhities. I think he and Don so must be related. It might have been boxers and yes Don would still do it.

 

[mickeystoontown]

Glad you guys figured out the mystery of the new tire!

Yeah, I don't blame you for not going to the race. I could tell there was A LOT of people from your pictures. Wow! Too bad the line was so long you didn't get your shirt. You should have gotten SOMETHING for all of your troubles.

Yay on the Disney glasses! I bought a set of McDonald's Disney glasses at a yard sale for 2.00 (fifty cents a piece). They were for the 25th anniversary.

I couldn't believe how many people were at the convention center! I read online that there were over 700 couples!

I am always on the lookout for Disney stuff no matter where I go. I am certain at some point in time, anything Disney will become a collectible.

I think DH and I would have bowed out of the dash ourselves...that's just too many people and it sounds so disorganized! The frustrating thing is that the organizers of the event most likely were thrilled with the crowds and called it a success. I almost wish they would have sent you a survey afterwards so you could have told them what's what!

Love Disney glasses, especially the ones from McDonalds. We have quite the eclectic set ourselves.

I did a little reading online after we came home and they did say that the dash was a complete success. If they send me a survery, you can bet your boots that I'll be completing it!

EEK to the Arlington. I will be amazed if you stay there another night. Don and I would have chucked the dash too. I'm thinking I would be writing the Convention people a letter. They pretty much misrepresented the whole thing. Shame on them. They did draw a lot of people down there tho. So for them it worked.

As to John standing in the window in his tightywhities. I think he and Don so must be related. It might have been boxers and yes Don would still do it.

We ended up staying the next night too because we were afraid if we checked out, we'd never get another room.....because there were so many people there for the diamond dash.

I figured the hotels in the area were jumping for joy when they saw how many people were participating in the dash.

 

[mickeystoontown]

The boss and I just got back from a swearing in ceremony. One of our Judge friends was elected as a Supreme Court Justice and it was something that we felt we had to go to. You know the whole need to be seen thing. We never did get to see our Judge friend though....except when he was onstage during the ceremony.

I hate those kinds of things. I had to wear a dress, pearls and everything. Sucky way to spend an afternoon.

 

[aaaateamsgrandma]

The boss and I just got back from a swearing in ceremony. One of our Judge friends was elected as a Supreme Court Justice and it was something that we felt we had to go to. You know the whole need to be seen thing. We never did get to see our Judge friend though....except when he was onstage during the ceremony.

I hate those kinds of things. I had to wear a dress, pearls and everything. Sucky way to spend an afternoon.

I hate having to get dressed up for no reason. Had you known you wouldn't see him you coulda worn slacks. I know you are glad you went tho. We all have to do those kinds of things on occasion. But a dress. YCH.

 

[KatMark]

The boss and I just got back from a swearing in ceremony. One of our Judge friends was elected as a Supreme Court Justice and it was something that we felt we had to go to. You know the whole need to be seen thing. We never did get to see our Judge friend though....except when he was onstage during the ceremony.

I hate those kinds of things. I had to wear a dress, pearls and everything. Sucky way to spend an afternoon.

I hate those things too. I've gone to several luncheons honoring various lawyers here at the office and I dread every single time I have to go to one. The dress thing doesn't bother me all that much...I normally wear a dress 3 or 4 days of the work week anyway (we aren't a "casual" law firm).

 

[longing2Batdisney]

Glad you were able to find some Disney treasures at the market! WHOA! on the line of people...glad to hear the tire question was figured out...can't wait to hear about the rest of the day!

 

[Cameo818]

I had to wear a dress, pearls and everything.

To me, the worst part about dressing up is the "everything" - most especially pantihose and heels! Gah!

 

[mickeystoontown]

I hate having to get dressed up for no reason. Had you known you wouldn't see him you coulda worn slacks. I know you are glad you went tho. We all have to do those kinds of things on occasion. But a dress. YCH.

I hate those things too. I've gone to several luncheons honoring various lawyers here at the office and I dread every single time I have to go to one. The dress thing doesn't bother me all that much...I normally wear a dress 3 or 4 days of the work week anyway (we aren't a "casual" law firm).

I absolutely positively hate dresses! Just can't stand 'em. If it were up to me we'd wear polo shirts and khakis every day. In the Summer, my boss wears shorts and t-shirts or polo shirts. He sits behind his desk so nobody sees him from the chest down. During the Winter, until it gets really cold, he continues to wear his shorts. He wears jogging pants most other times. He is the definition of casual. Most times, I wear the casual type pants...khakis, navy pants or black pants and a nice shirt.

At the other law firm I worked for, the boss only came in the office in the morning. He usually worked from home in the afternoon. I would come dressed nicely for morning and go home at lunch and change into jeans.

I would hate working somewhere I had to really dress up every day. Don't see how you do it Kathy.

 

[aaaateamsgrandma]

I absolutely positively hate dresses! Just can't stand 'em. If it were up to me we'd wear polo shirts and khakis every day. In the Summer, my boss wears shorts and t-shirts or polo shirts. He sits behind his desk so nobody sees him from the chest down. During the Winter, until it gets really cold, he continues to wear his shorts. He wears jogging pants most other times. He is the definition of casual. Most times, I wear the casual type pants...khakis, navy pants or black pants and a nice shirt.

At the other law firm I worked for, the boss only came in the office in the morning. He usually worked from home in the afternoon. I would come dressed nicely for morning and go home at lunch and change into jeans.

I would hate working somewhere I had to really dress up every day. Don't see how you do it Kathy.

We wear slacks and just nice tops or sweaters. But Friday, jeans and casual shirts. I have some fancy tshirts. Love Fridays. We even wear capris and nice tops in the warm weather. The boss always wears black pants, black knit shirt, black jacket. Sometimes when it is really hot he will wear a light colored shirt. I bet he owns 20 of those black shirts. They are like a tshirt but that cool knit stuff. He thinks a jacket makes up for it.

 

[mickeystoontown]

Glad you were able to find some Disney treasures at the market! WHOA! on the line of people...glad to hear the tire question was figured out...can't wait to hear about the rest of the day!

I was stunned at the number of people at the convention center. The way it was told to me was that only a limited number of people would be chosen to participate. 700 + couples isn't my idea of "limited number of people".

To me, the worst part about dressing up is the "everything" - most especially pantihose and heels! Gah!

Oh I agree. I went all out today......pantyhouse, heels AND a slip!

 

[mickeystoontown]

We wear slacks and just nice tops or sweaters. But Friday, jeans and casual shirts. I have some fancy tshirts. Love Fridays. We even wear capris and nice tops in the warm weather. The boss always wears black pants, black knit shirt, black jacket. Sometimes when it is really hot he will wear a light colored shirt. I bet he owns 20 of those black shirts. They are like a tshirt but that cool knit stuff. He thinks a jacket makes up for it.

My last boss wouldn't step into the office unless he had on a suit and tie. He was pretty vain. This boss couldn't give two hoots what a person thinks of what he wears.

 

[mommytothreeboys]

UGH...I HATE pantyhose! Avoid them like the plague!

 

[mickeystoontown]

UGH...I HATE pantyhose! Avoid them like the plague!

If my legs were shaved, I would sooooo be shucking these pantyhose right now.

 

[aaaateamsgrandma]

My last boss wouldn't step into the office unless he had on a suit and tie. He was pretty vain. This boss couldn't give two hoots what a person thinks of what he wears.

Then he would love Don. He doesn't wear the tube socks anymore with the different colored tops and no cowboy boots. He has moved to tennis shoes.

 

[racefanof88]

Wow, I have missed so much. I can't keep up with you...... I swear when I read your posts I feel like you are writing about me. We seem to have the same luck . And I have to stop to pee about every hour and a half too. I get so tired of hearing "AGAIN?"

 

[aprilisis]

I can't believe how much I missed in a few days!!! Sorry your trip was not so good. Oh- and I'm with you on the pantyhose! I HATE them.