Part of Slice of Life by Two Writing Teachers March Slice a Day Challenge! I’m slicing every day this month. Thanks for stopping by. 🙂

This hotel is a little fancy. I mean, thank you hotwire… but it is a little fancier than we are used to, with the marble floors and all. When we first walked in the kids were all wide-eyed looking at the shiny things and all the well-dressed people.  “Mama! You didn’t tell us to wear tuxedos!”

This morning I took the kids to the indoor saltwater pool downstairs.

As we walked to the elevator – in our Target bathing suits under our old navy clothes, I thought about hotel pools. As a kid on vacation, I would hang out at the pool for as long as I could, and befriend other kids, I guess.  As a parent, I’ve taken kids to hotel pools to fill an hour, a day,  and to try to tire them out when they were little and had slept for a whole car trip. Hotel pools smell of chlorine, have a selection of strangers around and do not have a lifeguard.

This fancy indoor saltwater pool at this fancy hotel didn’t smell of chlorine, but there was a selection of strangers around, and no lifeguard.

Other than the salt water, it was just the same as any other hotel pool, really. We put the towels on a little table, next to our bag, our shoes, our water bottles, my phone.  I watched the kids try to play while a few people were swimming laps, and a set of brothers raced and splashed with their dad. We watched a fancy family walk around with the hotel staff, and I wondered why they were touring the hotel pool in their winter jackets still.

After time in the hot tub and the pool, I told the kids we had just a few minutes left, and they started to get out to start drying off at the side of the pool. We watched a man get out of the pool, walk over and take one of the towels that we had set by our things.

I tried to convince myself that this had nothing to do with the fanciness of the hotel, the entitlement that people might feel. “It must be an honest mistake,” I said, “although my stuff is right next to those towels.” And we laughed a little. We watched him gesture to his sons where they too might get a towel. H started to say something like “Hey! Those are our towels.” But I shushed him. I’d rather us be the kind of people who don’t yell across a pool when someone takes their hotel pool towels.

We dried off in our respective locker rooms and dried our bathing suits in that shakey bathing suit thing. We put our old navy clothes back on and walked to the elevator. A woman and her dog walked up to the elevator and asked if it was okay for them to join us.

“Of course!” We all said. Lucky us, getting to meet a pup in the elevator of a fancy hotel.