If I don’t cash them in now, I think someday I may have enough hotel points to just retire and grow old in the nearest Holiday Inn. Now there’s an optimistic thought:) And with all those points stories have accumulated as well … life on the road leads to some pretty interesting hotel situations.

• In New Zealand, the bed was rocking to the tune of a 6.7 aftershock one night.
• In Vegas, my bed was rocking to the tune of two of the hotel workers when I checked in earlier than expected … eww.
• The Ping team commandeered the penthouse suite in Fort Worth’s finest and sent out live TV all over the world, not too very long ago.
• In Ontario, Calif., I found a secret numeric code, scribbled on a piece of paper, lodged inside the toiled paper roll hanging on the wall. (Why I didn’t call those numbers or play them in the lottery, I will never know.)
• In Phuket a buddy and i spent the equivalent of $5 US to rent the only rooms we could find during the Chinese New Year.
• In Binghampton, NY I climbed up on the roof and almost fell through the skylight.
• In New Jersey, I took a limo across the street to see The NY Jets play, one of the last games in which Tebo didn’t play.
• The Boston Hyatt thought I was a vampire because I was working the night shift, to the chagrin of the housekeeping crew.

Good times.

Oh and there is more, if interested … here are all of the hotel exploits from the Ping years on the road:

Ping Hotel Tales

So anyway … I have been at my current hotel, it seems, forever. Ha .. I have seen the training process of at least a couple of new breakfast buffet servers and noted their progress in mixing the waffle batter. All of the workers have had to endure my joke that in Texas we have Texas-shaped waffle irons, which make the best Belgians … I digress …

And my most recent extended stay did not disappoint.

I have a new mental sticky note jotted down regarding my Best Western room here in Dillon, Mont. Before I share … just let me say, as BWs go, this, The Paradise Inn, is not all that bad. I mean, here, who cares? … Most people only need a bed between fly fishing or moose hunting marathons … nothing fancy.

I can’t complain. There is Wi-Fi, and it works pretty well, even though it asks me for a password every night (going on two and a quarter new moons).

I said sticky note … and it was a note indeed. The sweetest little handwritten note from my mystery housekeeper, Cindy B.

Cindy B. thought it was so special and so important to inform me, in her nicest cursive, so she wrote me a note to tell me she had put fresh sheets on the bed a few days back. Well now, isn’t that special?

I would love to see her intriguing ambiguous posts on Facebook … I digress …

WHAT!?! Wait a second there Cindy B. I have never gotten a note from you before. Why the heck not? Have you just been shy? Writer’s block … or has there been nothing much to write about. Have you in fact waited weeks and weeks and weeks to change the sheets?

Surely I would have noticed … but then again, when I assume the old horizontal position during these Dirty Gig projects, I crash immediately.

OH … then I started thinking. Maybe Cindy B. changes the bedding every night, but maybe there was something extra special about my slumber that night. Ha … horrendous thoughts of all kinds of accidents passed through my head. … Got me to feeling mighty embarrassed and feeling pretty bad for Ms. B.

Surely not …

Analyzing the possibilities and what to do, I referred back to my minor area of college study … English literature. I recalled the passage from the prophetic 1984. Remember when the protagonist Winston (hey we’re both kind of protagonists and we’re both named after a cigarette brand … I digress) … remember how the ever-clever Winston leaves a speck of dust on the page of his blog … er, uh … diary, so he can detect if Big Brother, Cindy B. or anyone for that matter has entered his room and read his memoires? Remember that?

Well … oh so very Orwellian or Winstonian or whatever, I decided to leave a little trap of my own. Don’t tell the Best Western, nor Cindy B., but from now on my sheets will be monogramed with the tiniest of tiny little black dots from an ink pen … beneath the guest pillow, so to speak.

If I remember to look (a big IF) and if I see the same dot two days in a row … Well Cindy B., rest assured, I am on to you and your slothful, non-germaphopic ways.

Know what I sayin?