Queen of the Rednecks

      A word of advice for those who want to see the best of America: Avoid Great Wolf Lodge. Those who know me well will not be surprised to hear that I am not really a resort/amusement park/arcade kind of person. (You may be surprised to learn that I do love a good water slide.) Nevertheless, despite some really good water slides, Great Wolf Lodge does not put forward our country's best face.
      The Aliens ended up spending a few days at Great Wolf Lodge when we first returned to the US this summer. The other hotels in the Mason area were, inexplicably, booked, and we needed a home base from which to drive our children to see their various friends. So we checked into the lodge. The whole hotel is set up to provide an exhaustingly entertaining experience. Kids run up and down the halls on treasure hunts with magic wands that set off chimes, bells, and voices. Hysterically cheerful desk clerks check in guests. The arcade bings and beeps like a junior version of Las Vegas, the snack bars and restaurants hawk enormous portions of sugar and fat. It's the culture of R&R at its most frenetic. The clientele seems to be mostly made up of people who should definitely not appear in public in their bathing suits, but who have decided to buy string bikinis several sizes too small. They have attempted to make up for the clothing deficiency by covering up with tattoos.
       I spent the first few days at Great Wolf Lodge feeling fit, smug, and a little shell-shocked. Then came day number 3. I returned, sticky and hot, from a humid, two-hour bike ride with my fitter and better-bike-equipped friend, but decided to wait until after lunch to shower. Drew and I walked across the street to Chipotle, the rest of the family being occupied elsewhere. We returned from our lunch, hotter and stickier, and found that our little wolf bracelets didn't work to open the door to our room. So we trotted down to the desk, where we met Eric, who had come back from his lunch to discover the same thing. We explained our problem to the friendly desk clerk, who told us,
       "Oh, that's because checkout is at 11."
       But we weren't checking out until the following day.
       "I have you checking out today."
       But we booked the room for four nights.
       "That's right -- four nights from Sunday to Wednesday." Smile.
        But we arrived on Monday.
       "But you were booked from Sunday to Wednesday." More smiles. This clerk was cheery, but she wasn't a pushover. And seemingly, she had the paperwork (the electronic version at least) to prove it. Also, while we were taken aback at being summarily evicted from our room, we weren't entirely sure that we hadn't made a booking mistake. We were buying a house, moving from one country to another, sending a child on a mission trip to India, trying to enroll in a public school without yet being residents of the district, planning a year of homeschooling, and keeping up a fairly intense social life. Sometimes when you have a lot of balls in the air, one drops.
        Seeing that our stuff was still in the room, the clerk did relent enough to allow us access for 30 minutes. No more. What did she think we were going to do, steal the soap? If she did, she was right. I used part of my 30 minutes after being asked to leave Great Wolf Lodge to take a much-needed shower. Then we packed up as quickly as we could and hauled ourselves ignominiously to the only home we had left -- our rented van.
       The experience left me with one question: If Great Wolf Lodge is the bastion of the American Redneck, and I just got myself kicked out of Great Wolf Lodge, what does that make me?