A Wet Farewell to Turkey

Life in the Boomer Lane has been wrestling about what should be the blog focus of her just-completed trip to Turkey. There were two top contenders. One was the astonishing beauty of the terrian, filled with sites of deep antiquity. The other is her new-found knowledge that, when one uses a bidet, then stands up to turn the bidet faucet off and turns it the wrong way, the bidet water shoots out of the toilet onto the user.

Clearly, the political drama that is now playing out in all of our media outlets, tells LBL that we are all currently living in the Age of Feces and Urine. For that matter, she will delay her intellectual musings about the terrain, the history, the culture of Turkey, and, instead, head back to the bathroom.

She will skip to the end of her trip. On the last morning, Now Husband left early for two weeks on Rhodes. The hotel thoughtfully brought them coffee, so they could sit for a few minutes before Now Husband headed off. LBL completed packing and went to the open-air hotel restaurant one last time, to sit facing the beach and water, where she could drink even more coffee and watch the slow-motion ballet of paragliders drift down from the sky and land mere feet in front of her.

The meditation this inspired was rudely interrupted by the knowledge that she had consumed way too much coffee and had to PEE. Immediately, if not sooner. She arose very, very carefully and just as carefully, minced her way back to her room. The mincing, combined with the good-byes she gave to hotel employees along the route, made the journey a bit longer than it should have been.

She arrived at her room. The room (actually a small cottage), surrounded by lush foliage and having no windows, was dark. Very, very dark. The key that operated the electricity was in its holder next to the bed. Pushing it down would activate the electrical current.

LBL had to use her cell flashlight in order to find the bed and key holder. She pushed the key down. No lights came on. She pulled the key out and tried again. Nothing. She tried the key backward. Nothing. She jammed it in. Nothing. LBL’s bladder, never a student of delayed gratification, decided to continue it’s own course of action.

LBL realized that she was at a critical juncture. Her choices were to use her cell flashlight to head to the bathroom and hope for the best (in retrospect, the wiser course of action) or to try one last time to get the key to activate the lights (an iffy course of action, at best). In her ongoing lifelong quest to conquer technology, she decided to try one last time to activate the lights. In her ongoing lifelong experience of failure in this realm, she was unable to do so.

She stood up and turned toward the bathroom. The motion was enough for her bladder to release, in a joyful display of exactly what it was intended to do. LBL stood next to the bed, afraid to move further. Finally, when she no longer had a need for the bathroom, she used her cell flashlight to find it.

She was now aware of several important details: All of her clothes were neatly packed and waiting at the hotel room door. The taxi driver would be waiting for her at the entrance of the hotel complex. Now Husband was long gone. She had been bested by technology yet again.

LBL will not detail what happened next. She leaves to to Loyal Readers to assume that eventually, she made it to the airport, and took the two flights and one last taxi ride that brought her home. Eventually, as is usually the case, these things work out. They just leave emotional scars and wet clothing before doing so.