A vignette by Gary Lee Kraut
I was woken by the rain at 6:30 a.m. Except that it wasn’t the rain; it was water drizzling into the room from the ceiling.
In a moment of veteran-like panic, I had a flashback to one year ago when a clogged water main broke and my upstairs neighbors failed to realize that their toilet was flushing into my WC. (When I up to tell them about it they said, “We don’t have a problem. See,” they showed me, “the toilet flushes just fine.”)
I now sat up in my moment of panic… and realized that I was in a hotel room. I was staying in a cozy little family-run hotel in a peaceable village near the D-Day Landing Beaches in Normandy. The water, I saw, was entering through the lintel above the bathroom door, undoubtedly from the shower of the traveler upstairs.
I checked to see that my bag, clothes, and shoes were safe and dry. They were, and so was the bed.
Some problems are actually better experienced when on the road than at home.
I nodded off to the sound of a slowing drizzle, another hour’s sleep before meeting with travelers to tell them war stories.
© 2010, Gary Lee Kraut
Gary Lee Kraut is the editor of France Revisited, www.francerevisited.com, the online magazine of travel, culture and curiosity.
First Published in N4Normandy November 2010
