After a late, bumpy coast-to-coast flight, I landed in Boston for TravelCon2019. By 2am, my cab dropped me at the Back Bay brownstone where I’d rented a VRBO studio apartment, and thoughtfully waited til I was in the front door. Nothing was creepy at all…until I found my apartment door, unlocked and open. Yep, solo lady arriving in strange building in the middle of a dark stormy night, finds creaky door just sliiiiiightly ajar. Not creepy at all!
I reached in to flip the lights, scanned every corner (which held very few places for a bad guy to hide) and realized that my studio was perfect, except for one tiny but critical problem: the latch on the door was warped. Not only did it not lock — the door did not even stay closed. With only four hours to sleep before leaving for the conference, I rearranged the furniture and slept with the bed blocking the door.
Over coffee at the conference I told another woman about my situation, and how I’d been up moving furniture in the wee hours. She looked at me in amazement, and said, “Are you telling me that you don’t travel with a door stop?”
Blank stare from me. Huh?
“Oh, sister – you get to an office supply store today, and buy yourself one of those rubber triangles that you kick under the door. I never travel without one. You can’t trust any lock. Have you never traveled alone before??” The crazy thing was not that my door was broken–it was that I was not prepared for that kind of thing. I trusted that I’d always have a lockable door.
The problem was fixed by the time I returned to the apartment that evening. I did stop to pick up a rubber door stop ($3.49 for a two-pack; peace of mind, priceless) One door stop now lives in each of my travel bags, and they do the trick. Fancier travel doorstops can be purchased online, but I’m feeling good about my low-budget models for now.
