(sp)ahhh...

It started so well. My mom and I headed north from Boston, timing our departure to correspond with a lunchtime layover in Quechee, Vermont, home to Simon Pearce of the ceramics and overpriced hand-blown glass fame, a sort of personal Mecca. Within the walls of the old brick mill, overhanging a dam as scenic as any, they also have food. The really good kind. We were seated at a two-top, right over the waterfall, and immediately served tiny, doll-sized buttermilk biscuits. Their size made them all the better to cram in your cramhole. We gobbled salmon with various roasted autumn-colored accoutrements, and a dish of caramelized walnut ravioli, plopped in a lemongrass-ginger-cream sauce that I’m pretty sure you get to drink in mug-sized servings in heaven. Dessert? And how. Let me just say this: chocolate, fleur de sel, blood-orange coulis, and an amen for elastic waistbands.


Fat and happy, we got back on the road, promising ourselves that the healthful living started now. The whole object of the trip, anyway, was to provide rest, recuperation, and a beginning to a new and healthy us.

After checking in to our room and judging the quality of the place by the personal-care products provided in the bathroom (June Jacobs—very promising), we decided to check out the spa. To get there, we walked down the longest hallway ever built by man, seriously. Once there, we were overwhelmed by the Moby Dick-sized book of treatment choices. Naturally, we put off the decision of whether to pamper ourselves with salt scrubs, Swedish massage, or herbal wraps, and instead walked back to our room, back down the longest hallway ever built by man, to change into our exercise clothes. After an extended drama involving hotel robes (Do we change into the robes here? Do we use the spa robes? Do we change AND wear the robe? What if they’re out of robes at the spa? What will we do with the extra robes we come back in? And so on, like a pair of Dustin Hoffmans, had Rain Man had been set at a spa, until one of us shouted a definitive: NO ROBES), we returned to the spa, robeless, and traveled—for the third time—down the longest hallway ever created by man.

The cardio room was mostly empty and seemed approachable. (One nameless individual, wearing headphones to listen to the TV, shouted to her daughter, on the elliptical machine immediately adjacent, over the volume in her head, “HOW DO YOU WORK THIS THING? WHAT’S YOUR HEART RATE?” not realizing that all of Vermont and some parts of Canada could hear her. But who cares! We were getting fit!) After a healthy dose of cardio, the weight room was empty, and we felt emboldened to enter. We pressed and pumped and pulled and pretended we knew what we were doing. By then, all that was left was a soak in the whirlpool.

Feeling we had worked off at least one doll-sized biscuit each, we decided it was time to get a nibble for dinner. It was quarter past eight. We were in the showers when the fire alarm went off. After several minutes of our brains quivering from the shrillness of it, we decided it was best to evacuate, even if we hadn’t yet managed to try to June Jacobs conditioner. Donning spa robes (thank god for them!), we padded yet again down the longest hallway ever created by man to the entrance of the hotel, where all 12 guests had gathered. They were dressed for dinner. In clothes. We were wearing spa robes. Otherwise mostly naked.

As we waited for the fire department to arrive, the wait staff brought around trays of coffee, then hot cider and a bottle of spiced rum, then a platter of cookies that could satisfy most of the school children in the county. “Can I get anyone anything?” the bartender practically pleaded. “A pair of pants?” I offered. “A real fire,” someone else suggested. As the evening wore on, those of us in the vestibule became fast friends. We helped ourselves to the computer perched atop the check-in counter, seeing if news of the not-fire had made CNN yet. “Might as well check my e-mail,” the guy celebrating his first anniversary said. “Might as well change our room rates,” Peggy countered. Together, we slid into a state of crying, giggling hold-your-shit-togetherdom. But even over the chilly temperatures and the impossibly slow response by the fire department and the unceasing BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP of the fire alarm as it destroyed our chances of ever hearing another fire alarm ever again, it wasn’t so bad.

An hour after the ordeal started, the fire chief excused us from the vestibule. To celebrate our freedom, Peggy and I embarked on a fifth journey down the longest hallway ever attempted by man. But by the time we got there, the spa—with our clothes and room keys in it—was locked. This meant, impossibly, another trip down the longest hallway man ever had the gall to create. Before we completed the trek, we ran into the maintenance man, who walked us back and let us in to collect our belongings. And then, dear friends, it’s true: We walked down the freaking hallway one time more, as blistered and dehydrated as any marathon runner, to return to our room. At least we were getting our exercise.