When you think of hotels that charge by the hour, what do you think of? What do you picture? Being a big fan of Law and Order, my mind immediately jumps to something out of an episode of SVU. A roach-infested skeezey joint, with hookers and crack dealers, hidden away in some sketchy New York neighborhood. Now, Love Hotels are a bit different, they're hourly hotels in Japan and Korea and they're legal, apparently some are quite nice. I learned about the existence of Love Hotels when my high school boyfriend, an exchange student from Japan told me how romantic it would be to take me to one (I was not particularly impressed by the idea). I even got a glimpse of a few in Japan (fromt the outside) when I visited Osaka in 2006. There are some interesting cultural differences between the US and Japan. Nothing illustrates them like... well... actually a million things you can see walking down the streets of Osaka, and this giant fucking ass-covered building is one of them. But I've gotten off topic. Hourly hotels aren't really my... scene. So I never cared that they're illegal in many (all?) states.
Until I needed one.
In my husband's first years out of school, before he was my husband, he worked and lived in North Carolina. Between my junior and senior year of college I went to live with him for a summer. Somehow in the middle of the summer the water in the apartment got turned off. Now he says the billing people didn't bill him, but I'm pretty sure he just forgot to pay. But whatever the reason, the water was shut off. And it took some time to get it back on.
After a couple days in the unforgiving southern heat, we were both in desperate need of a shower. So we found a little motel, explained the situation (there might have been some begging and promising that it wasn't a sex visit, I imagine it that way but I don't really know, I was hiding in the car) and ended up renting a room for an hour so we could shower. And that's my experience illegally renting a hotel room for one hour with my boyfriend. Steamy, right?