Movies are not always what you expect

by Amine BEN JELLOUN TOUIMI (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find USA

California. The sun, the beaches, the incredible views. For my first time in the USA, I had all these movies and stories in my head and I was excited to discover this wonderful state. My trip should begin in San Francisco. After a few days visiting the city, my girlfriend and I rented a car and decided to drive the state route 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We will be in a road trip. We'll just take our time, admire the scenery and sleep in a motel along the road. That's what they do in the movies, right? After a whole day of traveling and as the sun was setting down, we reached the wonderful city of Santa Barbara. It got darker and darker and we decided to find a place to crash before going for dinner. We weren't picky and we stopped at the first motel we saw. Unfortunately, this motel had just sold its last room over the phone as we were entering the lobby but the receptionist told us that there were plenty of other places to stay in the area. And indeed, crossing the street, there was another one, laying there between a cafe and a Chinese restaurant. Before we could even park, one of the receptionists came to meet us and told us that if we didn't have a reservation, there was no point stopping the car as there was no vacancy for the next 2 days. With my girlfriend, we looked at each other and wondered what was happening. Was it just bad luck? Things were not going as expected. Nonetheless, we went to a nearby hotel and there, a receptionist broke the news to us : a festival was being held in Santa Barbara for the next 2 days and it is very likely that every hotel or motel room was already booked. Well, that was bad luck. What to do in this situation? It was late, we were already tired of driving all day and we didn't knew anybody living in the area. We called a few hotels in the city but unfortunately, as we were told earlier, they were full. The nearest hotel that still had vacancy was 100 miles of Santa Barbara, a 2 hours car drive and neither of us was feeling confident enough to drive for that long in the dark. We reached to someone on AirBnB as a last chance gesture and went for dinner. What else could we have done? We stayed late at the restaurant, hoping for an answer but in vain. Thus, we parked the car somewhere calm enough and spent the night in it, discussing this unexpected turn of events and dozing off from time to time. The next morning, we went to the beach to watch the sunrise and a few minutes later, we both fell into a relaxing sleep from exhaustion. We woke up a few hours later to the sound of people playing, swimming and eating, and we looked back smiling at this weird night , telling ourselves that, well, we could have been in a movie.