Cleanliness Is Next To Craziness

Travel accommodations in the bush leave much to be desired, though we're no divas when it comes to living quarters. It's not that we need modern conveniences or a deluxe room to live in, it's just the issue of our quirky need for cleanliness. We'd really rather be camping in the woods, free of other human fingerprints, hair, and food stains. But the 100 mph winds, the hail storms and snow, and diverse wildlife keep that from being a feasible option. So we settle in to, here in Akutan, the Bayview Plaza. As you may have experienced sometime in the past, "plaza," in hotel terminology, is a synonym for "motel," "lodge," or "inn." The word itself prepares you to have absolutely no expectations whatsoever. 

Our usual custom upon arrival to a place such as this is in accordance with Jim's "thing" about hard surfaces, and Sarah's about soft surfaces. So we take Cavicide wipes from work (they kill everything except Hepatitis C) to the kitchen countertops and bathroom surfaces, then cover the couches with bed linens, duct tape the flat bottom sheet to the bed, lest our legs find the semblance of a mattress pad with squirming in the night (apparently, fitted sheets are for sissies), and boil all of the silverware for ten minutes. 

Even though Charley says, "it's good for your immune system," it still takes a few days for our good germs to cover up all of the other people's bad germs. But by now we're like normal people, walking around the house in always-slippered feet, showering with arms and legs huddled close to the body to avoid touching the nylon shower curtain, boiling our dishwashing brush daily to evade a build-up of bacteria, and deeming anything that touches the floor or walls "irreversibly contaminated," and thus of no use to us at all (we've lost some tasty morsels of food in this manner). We realize they prescribe medication for these kinds of things, but we like to have our wits about us.