Roy

In LA we stayed at the Fairmont in Santa Monica, thanks to a generous gift card gift from a colleague. It is great fun to stay at a fancy place like that for a night and pretend that you belong there.

One major giveaway that we don't belong there is Roy; he's our white 94 Honda Accord. He's all heart and a great car, but not as good looking as he used to be, especially with some of the bumps and bruises he's gotten lately which I blame entirely on our new obstacle course garage parking spot. It requires a level of precision in parking that I'm clearly not capable of.

So we were both a little uneasy about cruising up to the Fairmont valet in what can only be described (lovingly but fairly) as a sloppy jalopy.

We actually avoided this on the way in by "accidentally" pulling up to the side entrance where there were no witnesses, and Roy could be whisked away by a valet send around the corner to get him.

We more than paid for it on the way out. Roy was valeted and we had left our bags with the bellfolk. The valet car guy was significantly quicker than the bell guy, which gave us 15 minutes - a very, very, very long 15 minutes - to stand there in front of the Fairmont Santa Monica with Roy, next to a sampler of the world's most impressive luxury cars: a couple Porsche's, a Maserati, many Lexuses (Lexi?), not to mention the BMW's and Benz's.

I did a better job of not feeling embarrassed than Eric did. In fact, I took it as an opportunity to check Roy out.

His front license plate was hanging crooked so I walked up and inspected it. Both screws were rusted out pretty badly and it looked sort of precarious. I tugged at it a little bit.

"It looks like it's going to fall off," I said in my loudest non-yelling voice to Eric who tried his hardest not to acknowledge that I was talking to him.

I walked away from the car over to where Eric was standing.

"Stop." He hissed. "This is bad enough without you starting to pull things off the car." He was mortified.

The bags mercifully arrived not long after and we escaped without any further humiliation. As we pulled into the Getty Center parking lot 20 minutes later, Eric was almost fully recovered.

"I was embarrassed," he admitted. "And I'm embarrassed that I was embarrassed. And I'm embarrassed that I'm embarrassed that I was embarrassed."

Roy seemed mostly unscathed.

PS Roy had a major car milestone on the drive home: check out his odometer about halfway back!