alicia and co.: People warned me that it's hot in Texas...

On our house-hunting trip to Texas, Lyrad and I were discouraged after our first 3 days left us with no prospects of a good house to rent. But we figured the worst was over and the trip would go smoother for the last 3 days. Oh, how wrong we were!! On Sunday morning, we headed to church (with the ward we hoped to end up in), then on our way home from church, the traffic was very slow as everyone stopped to watch a big fire in the distance. Lyrad and I joked that it was our hotel on fire. Ha, ha, ha -- wouldn't that be funny, if out of the hundreds of hotels in the big city, OURS was the one to catch on fire? What are the odds of that happening? But our laughs turned to gasps as we came closer and saw that it WAS our hotel on fire! My first reaction was, "I must have left my hot curlers plugged in! I must have CAUSED the fire!" But as we parked on the street and walked to the scene of the fire, I was very relieved to hear that I was NOT the cause of the fire. Rather, the fire was an arson, started by a man named Mohammed on the 3rd floor who set his bed on fire. (We don't know his reason, but the speculation is that either he was mad at the manager, or that he and owner plotted this fire to get the $1.5 million insurance money.) We stood there watching the fire, listing off to each other the items we'd left in the room: laptop in the dresser drawer, phone chargers, our favorite clothes, library books and library DVD's, lots of groceries in the fridge to feed us for the next 3 days, our favorite luggage. The manager of a nearby Howard Johnson offered us a free room for our last 2 nights in Texas, and Red Cross gave us money to replace some of our things. Then we went to a ward member's home for dinner (and apologized for not bringing the bread I'd said I'd bring; the firemen wouldn't let me run in our room and get it). Later that evening after the fire was out, Lyrad went and asked a fireman if he could look in our 2nd floor room for the laptop. The fireman kindly risked his safety and went to our room, found the undamaged laptop in the drawer, wrapped it in a towel, then filled our suitcases with whatever clothes, books, DVDs, and toiletries were nearby. We were so grateful to get so much of our stuff back! Our clothes had glass shards in them, were soaking wet, and smelled like smoke, but we've been able to salvage them for the most part. We are so grateful we were safe and able to get so much of our stuff back!

We learned some lessons from this experience:

1) Don't procastinate! Every morning at the continental breakfast, I said, "I'm going to take a picture of the Texas-shaped waffle!" But I didn't do it the first 3 days, and now I never will get that picture!

2) Don't leave valuables in your room! (unless they're in the dresser drawer)

3) Don't joke about other peoples' misfortunes... it could be YOUR hotel that's burning down!

4) Cry, don't laugh, if you want to be on the t.v. news after a disaster has occurred

5) Check for smoke detectors when checking into a hotel! People who were still sleeping when the fire broke out at noon told us that by the time they heard smoke detectors in the distance, the hallways were already thick with smoke. The hotel had no sprinklers in the rooms, either.

6) Cheap hotels are cheap for a reason!

Lyrad and I have had a lot of memorable getaways, to Lake Tahoe, Paris, London, Rome, Belgium, Krakow, China, Hong Kong, and north Africa. But if I try to picture the hotels we stayed in, in those places, they're all just a blur in my memory. (Though I still laugh over our "5-star hotel" in China, where I called the front desk to tell them that I wanted a non-smoking room. The solution? A maid came up to our room and removed the ash try from the table to make it a non-smoking room.) But I will always remember every detail of our cheap hotel in Texas as we stood there watching it burn and trying to remember all the things we'd left in our room.