This is where my room was:

This coffee was the only familiar food I ate. The rest was paella and ramen and Palestinian food and of course that huge meal the first day.

I also went to see the Mucha exhibit, saw comedians John Mulaney and Mike Birbiglia, touched a sea urchin at the aquarium, and toured the Arabia sunken steamboat museum.

You have to respect the candor and Quality Assurance.

Then I came back home to Gary, my charmer.

I tried to up my phone game as well as my transportation game. Two mitigated successes.

Early failure, then success: I did have to try two times, but eventually I got my Apple Pay to work. I didn’t realize I needed to open the Wallet app first to use Apple Pay, it seems like I’d just be able to … just use it. I got there, though.

Early success, then failure: I set up my phone to act as my room key. (The imstructions were somewhere on the Hyatt page.) It worked the first time I was in the elevator alone. And then, miraculously, it worked when I was the the elevator with Young People and they said, “How did you do that with your phone?” Were they pandering to the old lady? Maybe. Sadly, it did not work as well the next day.

One of my favorite travel memories is one of Gary’s least favorite memories. Gary was recovering from an emergency gallbladder surgery, worst vacation nightmare manifested. He threw me out of the hospital room, and there I was, on my own, and I wanted to go far afield.

I think I caught a bus to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), went to Sausalito and back, then I caught a bus to the top of Union Square, took a cable car a block to the taxi stand and took a taxi back to the hospital.

I was elated at having mastered all the travel modes. I was Tarzan swinging vine to vine: top speed, supreme confidence. [Insert Tarzan yodel-yell.]

I wanted to re-create a little of that in Kansas City, and I came close.

Train: I did take the Amtrak to KC. Business class, Wi-Fi, downloaded a season of Taskmaster to the iPad. Hours flew by. Sadly, the train station is being rehabbed and there was a healthy hike from where the train stopped to where the station began. Plus, though I don’t have Mal de Débarquement Syndrome (which is a month of “disembarkation sickness” — I got my land legs eight hours later), I still looked so wobbly staggering under the weight of my bag that a …

… Little six-person electric tram stopped and offered me a ride for part of the way. Eventually I got to the information desk and asked the lady where the taxi stand was and she snorted, “Good luck with that.” So I downloaded the app and took my first …

… Uber ride. So easy. I’ve always worried they’d cancel, but I now know if you pay for Premium they tend not to. I’ve Ubered two more times since then, once, I swear, because I’d rather pay twenty dollars than climb the two blocks uphill after breakfast.

Then, the next day after I hopped off the streetcar I saw the e-bikes. “How hard can that be?” I thought. “You never forget how to ride a bike.”

I got the app, I loaded the card, I tried to make the e-bikes unlock and they looked blankly at me until I realized they were e-Scooters. Different service. Also, much more challenging balance requirements.

This is where my story turns sad. I was riding back from the Art Museum in my niece’s car when she said, “Look, e-Bikes.”

I said, “This is what we’re going to do. I’m going to unlock an e-Bike and ride it while you circle the block.” (And, unspoken, alert someone if I’ve collided with a tree.)

People, the tech part worked great. It unlocked, it beeped in a friendly way, but the actual mechanics of riding a bike failed. You know how you push a bike with one foot with enough force to get it moving and then position your feet on the moving pedals? Couldn’t do it. Bike was too heavy to get momentum. Plus, I could not get my non-pushing foot on the spinning pedal.

So, I sadly locked it back up again, having logged my six minutes of failure.

Gary, who just heard this tale, confessed he snuck my bike downstairs while I was gone. He’s bringing it up again to see if I truly can’t ride a bike.

A man in the hotel elevator commented on how hot it was outside.

”It hasn’t felt hot to me,” I said. “But then, I have been through menopause and know what hot really feels like.”

(This was followed by the slighttest of pauses before I apologized for the TMI, and he said, “Oh no, I have five older sisters, you can’t embarass me,” and then I said, “Well that just makes me want to try” as I exited the elevator. But that isn’t germane to my point about temperature.)

It only seemed hot to me on Thursday when I had the sun scouring my cheek and there was no cloud cover. Every other time I had an umbrella or tree to sit under and a mild breeze.

However, to counter the extreme heat warning, the hotel has set the thermostat in my hotel room (as well as all the common areas) to a bitter 68 degrees.

I changed my thermostat. I felt confident that I was setting the thermostat to heat, 74 degrees, and I would feel the air from the vent, and while it was not warm it was not icy. But then 15 minutes later, the air would be icy again and the thermostat would be set to 68.

Eventually I turned the thermostat entirely off and relied on God to heat the room to a comfortable temperature, which he did. But I have had it with the gaslighting thermostats in this hotel. Otherwise it has been a lovely stay.

“Well, except for the cantaloupe that tasted like meat at the restaurant,” you say.

… It occurred to me eventually that we were sharing plates and I transferred the little serving of melon / cantaloupe salad to a used plate. A used pork chop plate.

So now I’m off to Open Table to revise my published review.

I did paint Thursday, just it was watercolors. The hotel offers “experiences” and this month’s experience was watercolor painting.

I have no evidence because I left it behind. The instructor took photos; perhaps an email is in the offing.

The instructor’s grandmother also painted china like my great-aunt Rosemary.

I was not thrilled with the result. I used too much water. Did you know if your paper buckles that you’ve used too much water? My other instructor did not tell me that. Then again, on hearing the effort involved in getting just the right amount of water, I think oils are the way to go.

By the way, I’ve had a bad backache all week, and at the end of class my backache was fine. It has been bad to such a degree that only one other thing has relieved it:

Lying in the baked bean pit at the BBQ museum gave my back just the right support all over. (I texted the friend group that I was at Crown Center and one demanded it.)

I have seen this image on traveler reviews of this hotel.

I assume she wears a wig. I feel at home.

The train was brutally cold. I long for tomorrow’s 120 heat index.

I am in the midst of packing. The room is in chaos. I’m pulling all the options into a pile and deciding what to wear for the two weather forecasts: hot and steamy and rainy and hot and steamy and not rainy.

Above is a piece of the pile. Brown shirt is a definite, striped linen pants on the right are for hot days, and jeans are for the rain. All are way too big for me, but I will be eating recklessly.

The issue is the shoes. I know, those tennis shoes are ideal, aren’t they? Maybe a little smudged on the toes. I almost put them in the bag before I realized they were shoes of the dead from 2012, and I only wore them once. They might have been broken in for someone else’s feet, but not mine own. Back in the closet they went, perfect or not. Even I am no longer dumb enough to wear “new” shoes on vacation.

Instead I’ll be wearing the blue tennis shoes I bought when the navy blue shoes disintegrated at work during the Mass Shoe Extinction Event, or perhaps a pair of white sandals I might bring as backup if I end up at a snooty restaurant for lunch.

I fear I might end up packing 6 pairs of underwear and no bra.

I know we scored a necktie for Gary at the Raphael Hotel last time. I wonder if … no.

Oh, and of course, at the very last minute Gary volunteered to come along and then revoked his offer immediately after I agreed. I remember a time in my life this would have driven me crazy. But then, I remember a time in my life I would have worn those tennis shoes.