A Trailer Park Honeymoon

We were newlyweds when we arrived in Arizona for Grandma Mertz’s 90th Birthday party. And by newlyweds, I mean this was essentially our honeymoon. We’d gotten married the previous weekend and cut our initial romantic escape plans down to four days and three nights in Cabo San Lucas so that we could get to Phoenix in time for the festivities.

  This is where I recommend you travel with your significant other’s family BEFORE you get married. You need to have a sense of the type of accommodations they find acceptable BEFORE you commit to a life with someone. Are they a four-star resort family? Do they like big rental houses on Lakes where everyone stays together? And if so, does grandpa snore like a chainsaw? Do they have decent camping gear or perhaps a luxury Winnebago, or are they fine with a sleeping bag under the stars on top of acorns?

  Now, I grew up vacationing in motels that smelled like chlorine, so I didn’t enter this marriage as a high fallutin gal, but I did envision a union with upward mobility. At 29, I’d finally experienced room service and the occasional hotel with Jacuzzi tub that could fit two. That’s what I liked! My new husband and I had been to Laker’s training camp in Oahu for my job and our room had a view not of the parking lot but of the OCEAN! The honeymoon suite at the Palmilla in Cabo seemed to be a sign of more good things to come.

  Granted, we’d also been camping with limited gear, so my husband knew I had the capacity to be a good sport when roughing it, but he was aware of my appreciation for the finer things in life.

  When we arrived in Arizona, we pulled our rental car into a trailer park a half hour outside of Phoenix where apparently his extended family from Colorado liked to spend the winter. Snow birds, they call such folks. But when I think of snowbirds, I imagine the Yanks who flood the pink stucco palm tree covered Florida resorts. But this was July. In Arizona. This is when the snow birds should be in their city condos or mountain homes.

  Naturally, the complex had lots of vacancies, so my husband’s relatives rented several uninhabited trailers from friends at the sun-baked community where any oasis of green turned out to be Astro-turf.

  My husband’s brothers and sister brought their significant others as well. But have I mentioned this was our honeymoon? It struck me as odd that my new father-in-law decided the fair thing to do would be to have his children draw straws for accommodations. My husband’s sister Tess went first. She and her boyfriend of only 6 months drew the straw for a double wide across from the rec center where the big 90th birthday bash would soon be held. His brother Scott went next and headed toward the sleek air-stream that awaited him and his new girlfriend. My husband drew the shortest straw leaving his oldest brother and his wife with decked out double-wide down by the laundry room. What could the short straw mean? Was this drawing more about size or location? As we lugged our suitcases across the scorpion infested gravel, dodging tumbleweed in the welcome warm breeze, I spotted a tiny camper with a hitch. That can’t be it, I thought. Oh, but it was it.

  The camper was too small for our suitcases so we left them on the picnic table outside. The hot musty smell forced us to open the louvered windows above the rusty sink. There was no bed. The dining benches were our sleeping quarters and their foam had deteriorated into the crumbs resembling those at the bottom of a Cheerios box. The bathroom was the size of a broom closet and shortly after we’d taken our most precious belongings and honeymoon souvenirs out of our suitcases lest they get stolen in the night, there was a tap on the door. My husband’s aunts stood there with Mason jars full of water. “You really shouldn’t drink from the tap,” they cautioned, “And I probably wouldn’t brush teeth with that water either. And if you can avoid flushing the toilet that would be best. Well good night! We’ll see you kids in the morning!”

  And off they went leaving us to not have sex on the pleather crumbling bench beds that were barely long enough for my legs and definitely weren’t 6’2 like my husband. He had his knees bent all night, but at least the purr of his snoring indicated some sleep was happening. I laid there on top of a souvenir Mexican blanket dreaming of the sound of Cabo waves and trying not to think about the spores, bugs or diseases that might be lurking in the decomposing foam until I eventually dozed off just as daylight began to tickle the louvers on the windows.

  We awoke to summer sun baking our metal coffin, and discovered we were covered in white spots. All over every exposed inch of skin and in our hair. Oh my god! What is this? Are they moving? I investigated my husband’s head. No. No. Thank god they were stationary. Do they itch? No. No. I don’t FEEL anything. We looked up. The ceiling was peeling and all night, little pieces of surely lead covered paint had rained down on us like a honeymoon snowstorm in Arizona.

  We filled our backpacks with toiletries and clothes for the day, and headed off across the quiet cluster of trailers in search of running water and definitely some coffee. And I’m thinking “I believe they like me,” this new family of mine, but they may not so much like the exhausted, angry, white dotted, girl crossing the dusty lot at this moment. But come on! I had proven to been flexible over the years.

When my fiancé left his bunny-slope qualified girlfriend at the top of a black diamond on our first ski trip, and I finally made it down covered in ice and bruises, I rolled my eyes and got back on another lift.

  When vegetarian me showed up for a family dinner and even the salad had bacon in it, I proved adaptable.

  When my brother forgot the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne at our wedding and detoured to a song he’d written about a Hobo hopping a train - who my brother said would have loved our open bar - I laughed it off.

  But here in this sun-baked lot, exhausted, covered in paint chips with matted hair and seeking a flushable toilet, while knowing I was about to be seen by swarths of extended family, many of whom I’d yet to meet, and I hear my brother-in-law’s girlfriend’s hairdryer going in a shiny air-conditioned air-stream, I burst into tears.

  And that is when Grandma Mertz comes out of her trailer, leaning against her walker. “Dearie, what's wrong,” she asks.

  “I’m tired and dirty and I just need a shower,” I say as tears merge with my sweat.

  And this woman who raised her five children through the great depression and WWII by baking pies in a kitchen about the size of our trailer kitchenette, socking away the money she made so her alcoholic husband couldn’t drink all the proceeds on frigid Minnesota nights, she wrapped her ample arms around her polka-dotted newest granddaughter-in-law and turned me toward the shower in her trailer – the one with a front porch and a view of Camelback Mountain. And when I came out into the sun-filled living room, she handed me a cup of coffee and I was once again adaptable and ready to begin my life in this family of tender-hearted trailer park travelers.

As told at Story Salon on April 2, 2025.