ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Holiday Inn has started doing this thing called “Pointbreaks” where they give you a list of select hotels that for a limited time are available for 5,000 points a night, which is almost nothing. For perspective, the el-cheapo bottom line hotels can hardly be found for less than 15,000 points a night. So this is basically the coolest thing ever. When I discovered this last weekend, my boyfriend and I were in the middle of trying to plan an impromptu trip to Colorado, which we’ve been bent on ever since we got the new car. And by impromptu, I mean that we first got the idea around 3:00 and agreed to consider it further when we got home. By 6:00 we had packed up most of the shit we would need and were all but prepared to haul ass out the door, when my boyfriend had a flash of insight and checked the weather forecast. Moderate to severe thunderstorms for the Colorado Springs and Denver areas.

As you might imagine, this put a damper on things. Obviously it didn’t make any sense to drive out there to see any outdoor attractions if thunderstorms would just keep us trapped in the hotel, sipping restlessly at coffee in styrofoam cups and clawing futilely at the windows. But we were still determined to something, SOMETHING. We’re not the type of people who do fun things. We’re routine. We come home from work. We make dinner. We eat and watch our TV programs for whatever evening. If we’re feeling just crazy, we might do something unusual like play a board game. Sometimes we do crosswords or read. We do that a lot, actually. But you get the picture. Having ramped ourselves up into this wholly unnatural state of willingness to do things, the idea of not doing things was now almost unbearable.

Well, we thought after standing about wringing our hands for a while and trying to come to terms with this unexpected new development. We can go to Chicago! It was getting later by now, so we checked the availability of Candlewood Suites (the cheapest points to benefit ratio hotels in the chain).

So we checked out the Holiday Inn website and figured out about the Pointbreaks thing, and it turned out that the Holiday Inn in Memphis was an option and we experienced this brief moment where we thought, hey, Memphis, we could do that! But then we thought about it and realized we couldn’t think of anything really great to do there, not without more time to look stuff up, just like with Chicago, only much more so. There’s Graceland. And then what? Without the time to do any research on our destination, we would drive 7 hours just to sample the barbecue, sneer, and speed home to Kansas City.

The Staybridge Suites in west Des Moines was on the list, and so was the new Aladdin Holiday Inn in downtown Kansas City. So we scrapped any plans of leaving that night and decided to go visit my boyfriend’s mom in Des Moines. We booked the Staybridge for labor day weekend and the Aladdin for the next weekend. We decided to blow all my Holiday Inn points this way.