Well, this is my eleventh YA tour and I think I finally have the story that tops all of my other host family stories. See, every day on tour we stay in the homes of members. People who we don’t even know take us into their home for a night. It’s kind of a strange system, you meet these complete strangers and go and spend the night in their home. It almost always produces interesting stories. One of my favorite parts of the day is when we get into the tech van in the morning to compare stories. We all like seeing who has the best story, either that they stayed with some kind of multi-millionaire with an intense mansion, or that they had some kind of horror story where they stayed in the ultimate ghetto of ghettos. Most host families are somewhere in between and it’s really nice to be able to stay in normal homes most of the time. It’s just really fun to exchange stories.

So… my story begins with the lady that was to be my host mom. After the show was finished and struck I went out into the audience and Shayla introduced me to Cindy. She was a really cute Korean lady. She took us out of the high school that we’d been performing in and realized she wasn’t entirely sure where she had parked her car. It was unseasonably cold for where we were in Oregon and so she was like, “let’s run!” So she starts running in her skirt and nice clothes. Shayla and I didn’t have much of a choice so we start running too. Keep in mind, we’d just finished a full show and strike, so we were considerably tired as it was, plus we had all of our luggage. We ran all the way up this hill to the street where she thought her car was. When we got there we couldn’t find a parking lot so we ran to the next street corner and couldn’t find a parking lot there either. So, we then ran all the way back to the high school where we found George, our presenter. He offered to drive us around until we could find her car. We hopped in his car and drove around for a little while checking the different parking lots at the high school. Finally we found her car and she took us to McDonalds.

After McDonald’s she started driving us back to her house. On the way there she started talking about her house. She was kind of hard to understand because of her accent but we tried to answer the questions as best we could. She said she’d been told that we needed to stay in two separate rooms, and something about one of the rooms having a rug and the other one not having a rug. We told her we were fine to stay in the same room, which seemed to help.

When we got to her house she started showing us around. She told us to leave our stuff in her front room and she showed us her living room, the bathroom, kitchen and led us back to the front room. In the whole tour she didn’t actually show us a bedroom. Then she left us in the front room and kind of indicated the rug as the place to sleep, and went into her room. Shayla and I looked at each other with semi-incredulous looks. She hadn’t left us with pillows or a blanket or anything… just… the rug. She didn’t even suggest the couch as an alternative to the floor. So, we changed into pajamas, pulled a couple of small pillows off the couch and went to sleep. A while later I woke up with really cold feet. I was already wearing pajama pants a t-shirt, my YA warm up jacket and my Superman sweatshirt that I wear when we’re setting up. So I pulled my warm up pants out of my suitcase and wrapped them around my feet. I laid there for about 15 minutes before deciding it wasn’t such a great idea. So I put the pants on over top of my other pair of pants and wore the legs over my feet. That was enough better that I could go back to sleep. At 3am I woke up to Shayla shaking me. “Brittny, let’s take over the couch.” So, we curled up on either end of the couch and went back to sleep.

The next morning at 6:15 our host mom came in and demanded that we get up and get ready for the day. So, even though we couldn’t have had more than 5 hours of sleep, we got up and got ready for the day. She insisted at that we leave by 7:15, even though we didn’t need to get to the stake center until 8:00 (and that’s 8:00 YA Standard Time, which really means that we weren’t going to leave until at least 8:15) On the way over she insisted that I write down her address so that we could both write to her. She almost missed the stake center because she didn’t know where it was. I was only able to find it because I saw the big Deseret Industries bin outside, so I knew it had to be an LDS church. I pointed it out and we turned around and went back. We were there a full 20 minutes early, before the van, or the bus and at the same time as our presenter. After Cindy left we started telling the story. Don’t worry, we absolutely were able to trump any one else’s story , I think for the entire tour. The night Shayla and I spent on a rug.

I think the funniest part was just that she really was the sweetest lady. She just seemed really flaky. Oh, and we did see her bed, this huge fluffy thing with tons of pillows and a really squishy looking comforter. If we could have blamed it on her being Korean and having different customs then it might have been an entirely different story. I can totally do culture differences, but it was like she just hadn’t even considered that we might want a bed or at least a blanket. Oh, to top it all off, when I opened the lunch she had packed me for the next day there wasn’t anything like a sandwich in it. Fun times.