Bedding and Breakfasting with the Bohemians

The woman on the telephone returned from her revels in the ether long enough to affirm that yes, they did serve hot breakfast in the lobby of their beach town B&B, although it wasn’t, in spite of the place’s Germanic title, a proper German breakfast. To hear her tell it, their “all-American” breakfast was actually quite popular with the Europeans who were attracted to the place by its multilingual website.

So, hard-boiled eggs, cheeses, and great fanned trays of sliced leberkäse would not be mine, but at least I would be fed and offered coffee within twenty feet of my pillow the morning after the wedding we would be attending, which meant the residents of this hidden seaside community would be spared my chartreuse visage at least until checkout.

Feeling tentatively alive on the morning after my old friend’s nuptial bash, I slipped downstairs and surveyed the promised buffet. A cereal bowl of scrambled eggs, a picked-over Pyrex brownie pan with a few cubes of unctuous home fries, and a suspiciously full crock of sautéed hot dog slices (cool to the touch) seemed to apologize for themselves from a sideboard which also featured a disused toaster and a photograph of an Italian.

I lifted a red disposable Dixie cup off the stack by the coffee urn, and then jumped a little when I saw a name Sharpied on it. Upon closer inspection, all of the Dixie cups revealed the telltale droplets of having been run through a dishwasher.

My wife wasn’t having any of my leaving-the-room shenanigans, so I wandered out into the bright morning sun alone. A strong, handsome white pit bull sat in the middle of the quiet road and gave me a sleepy smile that seemed to suggest he’d been out late at a little doggie wedding of his own the night before. A block further was a café offering a Bellini for four dollars, so I strode in, placed my order, and appreciated the funky little town for being exactly what it was: the sort of place where a tired man can afford to buy a dog a drink on a Sunday morning.