Road Trip From Hell Ends Well

Its 1995 and I’m on one of my 5 day road trips all over Illinois as sporting goods multi line sales representative. No sales rep in this territory has ever covered this terrain. I have scheduled 4 average meetings, 4 bad meetings and one potential diamond in the rough meeting. The “Diamond in the rough” is a new soccer store in Quincy, Illinois that needs a lot of what I have in one of my soccer equipment lines.
The trip is going worse than expected. The 4 average appointments were bad and 2 of the 4 bad appointments actually cancelled on me without calling me. I get to Quincy(Population 1,000) at about 8:00 P.M. the day before the appointment. Usually getting a motel room is no problem in this sleepy town. Though in keeping with the theme of this road trip( The business trip from hell), there are no motel rooms to be found. There is a Professional Go Cart Race(Yes, a Professional Go Cart Race!) in town and every room in town is booked.
I finally find a motel(Let's call it the Bates Motel) that is going through major renovations but there is actually a human at the front desk. The man(we'll call him Norman Bates) at the front desk,who obviously flunked the test to work at the Post Office, tells me there are 3 functional rooms and only 1 is vacant. I took it. This room had no lock on the door and there were funky brown spots ( I don’t want to know) all over the walls. I had to pile all my samples against the door as a pseudo barricade. There were strange sounds coming from the hallway. None the less, I didn’t get an ounce of sleep. I kept thinking,” I hope my daughters are nice to there new step dad.
I got up the next morning(after about 35 minutes of sleep) and headed off to the last meeting. The diamond in the rough. I would have settled for a pleasant person telling me that they don’t need any of my sporting goods and have a safe trip home. Well, to my amazement, this store placed one of my largest orders of the year and became a great client. So I at least drove back home with a big order and big grin on my face.