The Woes of Night-Time Bathroom Management

 We arrived yesterday in the beautiful city of Chania, Crete, along with our wonderful guide, Doris. To be honest, prior to the planning of this trip, the only thing I knew about the island, other than it was a part of Greece, was that the guys who used to run my office’s parking lot were from this island, and the older man’s wife, also from Crete, made very good baklava.  To be honest, except for some good desserts, I really wasn’t expecting much.

Boy, was I wrong!  The island is a treasure trove of history dating back to the. Minoans, who inhabited this land thousands of years before Christ.  Their history, like lasagna, is built on layer after layer of invaders, including the Venetians, the Ottomans and the Arabs from Spain.  Plus, the place is so damn pretty with narrow little streets, beautiful flowers and of course, the sea.  

We are staying in a charming boutique hotel that was once the home of a Venetian sea captain in the 1830s. Our porter walked us up to our second floor room and as he opened the door, I immediately noticed that to the left was the bathroom and in the middle of the room was a couch. I stepped in further to see a set of stairs to the left which, from looking up from the bottom of the staircase, looked like a bed. Bob immediately ran up the wooden stairs and yelled down, “There’s no bathroom up here.” After 38 years of marriage, I knew he wasn’t telling me this as a point of fact.  Without saying it explicitly, I knew that he was telling me that we might have a problem.  For two people in their 60’s, the night-time distance to the bathroom is directly aligned with the number of decades one has been on the earth.  

The problem was further complicated by the myriad of lighting options we had in order to minimize the breaking of one or both of our necks as we descended the uncarpeted steps in the middle of the night. For ten minutes, I sat on the bed pushing buttons while Bob ran up-and-down the steps determining which lights would provide enough illumination to avoid a trip to Chania General Hospital while allowing us just enough darkness to fall asleep. After trying several options, we decided to leave the bathroom light on and shut its frosted glass door.  That seemed to be perfect for Bob but not so much for me. The downstairs was still quite lit and after several attempts of putting the pillow over my face without suffocating myself, I held up the white flag at 1:15 am.  I went downstairs, shut the bathroom light off and hoped for the best.

I am happy to report, we did not need to find out the location of Chania General.


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