A futon! A futon! My kingdom for a futon!
I'm taking next week off from work, so we were thinking of going north for a couple of days to visit either Seattle or Vancouver, BC. We ended up nixing the latter, because of the teeny detail that I foolishly left my passport and birth certificate in Chateau Chaos, but we are planning on heading up to Seattle for a day or so to ride the monorail there. One thing that is always a source of discomfort when we travel is that since we only sleep on futons at home (I started sleeping on futons sometime in the middle 1980s, and the best was sleeping on futons from around the same time; the bears, of course, have been sleeping on futons since they were born) it makes sleeping on hotel beds an exercise in extreme discomfort; there's something about 5+ feet of fluffy mattress, mattress cover, mattress protector, feather undersheet, and g-d only know what other junk that a hotel will place between me and my calvin kleins that reduces the sleeping part of the trip to the least favorite part of the day.
For this trip, I thought that I'd look for a japanese style hotel, or at least a hotel that uses futons. And, since I'm a hip and with it™ computer programmer, I decided to use net nanny google to look for listings.
Bad idea. Looking for "hotels with futons in seattle" gives, as you can expect, the webpages of approximately 10 million futon-sellers mixed with the webpages of approximately 10 million hotels (none of which are actually in seattle, mind you. The magic word "futon" brings up approximately 7.5 million hotels in Japan, which is nice, but not exactly convenient to Seattle (the suicide girl "how I lost my virginity" link was, um, spectacularly out of place even for this collection of useless links. Does anyone actually successfully use google for anything aside from doing programming searches any more? At least I didn't get the obligatory ebay walpurgis ad!) I must only assume that the only places that actually offer futons to sleep in are the hotels that cater to Japanese tourists only, and don't feel that it's necessary or even desirable to advertise in such a way so J. Random Gaijin will book a room, then be peeved that the hotel doesn't provide the standard uncomfortable American style bed like the one they sleep on at home.
Perhaps what we'll do is get a roofrack for the Prius, then just roll up a futon and carry it with us. It's probably easier to get a hotel room without beds than it is to get a hotel room with a futon (though I did find one, even though it's not on the same side of Puget Sound as Seattle is. It's frightfully expensive, and may be booked up. And, no, I'm not posting a link until after we've made our reservations!)