So ...

It's been a rough week. Wednesday was the calling hours and Thursday the funeral. We didn't have a ready dog-sitter, so we had to take Tyler with us. Due to several factors, we decided to get a hotel room Wednesday instead of driving back and forth, and instead of staying at my brother's. But check-out time was 11:00 a.m., and the funeral was at the same time. One of the points of the hotel room was to have a place for Tyler to be while we did what we had to do - but if we had to be out of the room at 11:00 a.m., that was no good. We asked about a late checkout, but they couldn't guarantee we'd get it at all (you have to ask after you've checked in, or the morning you need the late checkout, and if they're full up and somone has reserved your room, you can't get it), and even if we could, the latest they'd give us is 1:00 p.m. That wasn't going to be late enough.

So I gave in and booked the room for two nights. I knew we wouldn't be staying Thursday night, but that gave us use of the room all day long, for as long as we needed it, and I figured the convenience of that would balance out the extra $94 cost for a second night. Okay, maybe 6 hours of hotel room use wasn't quite worth $94, but it definitely was the most convenient way to do things.

It turned out that it really did work out well. Due to everything going on, we ended up not checking out till sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. But here's the cool part. The girl at the desk was the same one who'd checked us in, and she knew we were in town for a funeral, and had only needed the room the extra time for a place to keep the dog. When I went to check out, she decided not to charge us for the second night after all. So we got all the extra hours in the room we needed, for no charge at all.

I was beyond impressed, and extremely pleased. That was the Holiday Inn Express in Monaca, PA, and they get a huge batch of kudos from me.

Other than that, we went out on the boat. It was something my brother really wanted to do, so we did. We took Tyler. He really seemed to enjoy it. So that was his first time on a boat. He had an interesting little break from routine ... road trip, laying around on those big soft Holiday Inn pillows watching TV most of the day, then going for a boat ride.

At least someone had it easy. It was otherwise pretty rough. I wish I didn't have to go back to work today, but since I missed much of the week, I figure I oughta.