You decide: worth it or not?

Hindsight is a funny thing.

Upon arriving in Memphis, we made our way to our connecting flight to Fort Walton Beach. Upon arriving at the gate, we found out that the flight was oversold by three seats.

We had three seats exactly. Did we want to give them up?

In exchange, Delta was offering us $1200 worth of flying vouchers ($400 per ticket). We would also receive meal vouchers for dinner that evening and breakfast the next morning before our new 9am flight out on Sunday.

JB was off on Monday. We would still have some time to recover from our trip. And since we are going to be living overseas, money for travel is definitely appreciated.

We decided to take the offer.

What we didn't know, and what only hindsight would reveal at a later moment, is that there weren't any hotel rooms available, like, anywhere, in Memphis.

We stood at the ticket counter from 6pm until 8pm working with the agents. Everyone calling hotels. Everyone begging for a room. Technically we had earned three rooms. But we just wanted at least one. At least one room. Anywhere.

In the end, Delta could not find us a room in their "approved" hotel list. So, instead, we could go to an unapproved hotel on our dime and get reimbursed from them later. In exchange for this additional hardship, we would earn an additional $100 voucher for both JB and me.

Okay. That was fine. We'd pay for the rooms and dinner upfront and get reimbursed later. Fine. Just get us a room.

Okay, so now we have $1400 worth of free flying money but no hotel.

The only unapproved hotel we could find was a Budget Inn & Suites.

As JB and I sat on the edge of our beds two hours later, eating delivered Chinese food in our room, JB lifted an eyebrow and said, "We need to keep reminding ourselves that we are getting paid $1400 to sleep in this room tonight."

Yeah. Remind me. Again and again and again. Keep reminding me.

Honestly, I am pretty sure that this hotel was being used for some fairly illegal business practices. (Think drugs and prostitution for starters.) There were people in the lobby cussing and nearly having a fight. The lobby had no air and that Memphis humidity was killing us after having been in Washington for a week. A woman at the counter was trying to negotiate if she only used one of the beds in the room. There was a sign in the lobby saying we could not have guests come to our rooms? The air did not work in the "suite" part of our room forcing us to put the boys to bed in just their skivvies. There was no telephone anywhere in the room. No clock either. The housekeeper showed us to our room and ran up the flight of stairs while we stood at the bottom with a stroller and two car seats and two suitcases. At the top she yelled down: "Do you need help?" (And there was no elevator either.) There was a dead cockroach in the bathroom. There was a TV and some channels but they were very fuzzy. And the sign at the front desk said: "Wireless Internet available in some rooms." No telling which room you would get, and we obviously pulled the wrong room when I tried to sign in later that evening.

We did manage to get two pack-n-plays after explaining to the people at the desk, who spoke next-to-no English, what they were in every way we could imagine. But by that point we really didn't care. We were both just planning on picking a kid and taking him to bed with us we were so tired at that point. I slept on a sheet that had a mattress pad for a single bed spread out in the middle of the bed. I decided not to even touch the comforter.

This morning we are back at our house on Eglin AFB. Our flights this morning went flawlessly. We enjoyed spending our voucher money in the airport, and we will enjoy, even more, spending the $1400 worth of free tickets that we have to use.

In the end, it was worth it.

But barely.