Pool for a Day
A watery home away from home
This past week, a couple of friends were visiting from out of town on business, which meant one really important thing: we could hang out at their hotel pool. I don’t know how you feel about hotel pools, but I think they freaking rule. Sure, the urine to size ratio is probably horrifying, but a pool will always be an elegant luxury in my book, be it at the Four Seasons or the Holiday Inn. This hotel was somewhere between the two, AKA a Kimpton.
The pool was nestled in the back patio, which my friends told me doubled as a dance floor with a DJ. They were acutely aware of this fact because as previously mentioned, they were in town for work, and the DJ started spinning around nine and didn’t stop until midnight. Surprising only because most people in this town are safely curled up in bed at that hour, but of course, this is a hotel—its inhabitants aren’t from around these parts.
We secured an assemblage of unclaimed chairs and a single, prized lounge chair and pushed them as close as humanly possible under a single umbrella since the temperature was similar to that of an open flame. We huddled there for a while, looking at the pool, which was a thin rectangle the size of a bocce ball court. It was currently occupied by a man and a woman in a May-December situation, but not in the way you expect (the woman was older); a couple of single European women of a certain age; and a group of requisite hot young things in bikinis. Everyone drank frosé.
Eventually, one half of the small rectangle cleared of its occupants (May-December) and we entered the pool. The depth varied from three and a half feet on one end to four feet on the other end. We wondered why the nameless pool architect landed on this differential, but at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter. The long and short? Shallow. Quite literally.
We engaged in some movement that might be classified as “swimming”—kicking from one corner of the rectangle to the other. Being submerged in water made all the difference on the hot day—my body regained a somewhat normal temperature equilibrium. We sat there for a few hours, bobbing and gossiping, like sentient buoys.
I found by the time I got out I was—gasp—a bit chilly, a feeling I haven’t experienced in a lifetime or so. It quickly faded, but when I felt the hot air creeping into my pores there was a novel sense of gratitude rather than the normal panic.
Eventually, a man came up and asked if we could move our chairs so he could set up a bar festooned with some arrangements that looked like they had depleted the fake flower selection of several craft stores. We complied, realizing that our pleasant poolside paradise wasn’t long for this world. My friends had a work dinner, and the rest of us were tired.
Even though essentially I had gone from sitting in my house all day to sitting in a new location, I felt refreshed. The change of scenery and the stagnant water had done me good. It just goes to prove that even if the hotel pool is in your own backyard, it’s still a vacation.
♥️♥️♥️