Road Trip Wonders : Living @ The Holiday Inn

I was nineteen when I got my first summer job where I didn’t wait on tables. It was right after my first year of college and I wanted to have a more “serious” job. I think that’s what was on my mind when I applied and was tested to work at Holiday Inn’s Reservation Center in suburban Chicago, very close to my family’s home. It was kind of a dream job for me. An office job. I went to their training sessions, and felt very grown up. I could wear regular clothes, not my waitress uniform. I took a test and passed. The best part? I could swim and suntan during the day because I worked nights. This was fabulous. I was a sun junkie in a way I could never be now. Truly, there is no one on the planet happier than a Chicagoan on their first 70 degree day. It’s really an unnamed holiday where most people skip work, or leave super early, to hit the beach or their rooftops. Summer was all about soaking up the sunshine I’d need to get me through the months of cold, bitter cold. It was a time when we teens knew nothing about sunscreen. I’d lie out with friends slathering on baby oil mixed with a little bit of iodine and fry for hours.

At night, I’d get dressed up in business casual sit in my cubicle, which again felt very grown up, and I’d put on my headphones. Calls automatically dropped in for me to handle. Always one right after the other. All night, well, until about 11:30. It was a 24-hour reservation center at the time, I’m pretty sure it still is. I remember how hard it was to take reservations from New York travel agents who spoke a reservation language all their own, FAST. I remember having to read the short-hand on my screen so I could answer questions about what kind of facilities the Holiday-Inn-in-question had. Where it was located and what attractions the Inn was close to. I liked reading about places like Niagara Falls and Elvis and Graceland from the confines of my cubicle. I needed to know whether the Inn was a Holidome. I can’t really explain how fabulous the Holidome was to a kid who lived in a bitter cold place. You’ll just have to trust me that it was, at the time, a ton of fun for kids. There was an indoor pool and pinball machines and miniature golf. Anyway, the best memories I have are of all of us laughing and prairie dogging at the reservation center when something outrageous happened, which seemed like all the time. And I remembered my grandma and aunt who had been operators for AT&T. I imagined what their jobs were like in the twenties and thirties and forties.

Nearly thirty years later, I am living in a Holiday Inn. For a short time. I’m in tune to the comings and goings. To the timeline that is another hotel renovation project and its own unique personality. This is kind of fun for me in lots of ways. Of course it’s fabulous to get to travel with my husband’s work. But also, I’ve come full circle, in a way. Hubby is working for Holiday Inn, well, the owner of a Holiday Inn. And I’m along for the ride. Where “every day is a holiday.”