The room is air-conditioned.  It has a door with a lock.  It is clean.  It has a bathroom with hot and cold water and little wrapped soaps and jars of hair products and toilet paper and towels.

When I pull the shades, the room becomes dark.  When I turn the TV on, it does not explode.  When I plug in the phone charger, electricity flows to my phone.

The neighbors in the two adjoining rooms do not engage in wall ball like the Cooler King from The Great Escape.  They do not wake up at odd hours for impromptu kung fu demonstrations.  For all I know they may be dead, which while sad, makes for quiet neighbors.

The people at the reception desk seem nice enough, they speak English and most likely a variety of other languages.  The one guy looks like he might speak Klingon, but that might just have been indigestion.

The wi-fi is free, fast and does not require a pesky password.  I am using it…now.

It is a perfectly reasonable hotel room.

Then we get to the bed.

It was advertised as a king-sized bed.  When I travel, I like to pretend that I am a king, so I opt for king-sized beds when offered a choice.  I would feel rather curious wearing my travel crown in a full-sized bed. 

Unfortunately it seems that the owners of this establishment elected to provision this room with an ersatz king-sized bed made up of two twin beds jammed together.   Regrettably they neglected to ensure that the beds are of equal height with mattresses of equal quality and of reasonable length.  

They’ve managed to disguise this ersatz bed with a king-sized dust ruffle and a king-sized comforter.  The three pillows are distributed across the king-sized head of the bed in a distinctively king-sized manner.

But it’s not a king-sized bed.  It’s a fake.  It’s like going to look at Elvis’ coat.

Sleeping in this so-called bed has introduced me to a new horror: the fault between mattress one and mattress two that threatens to yawn open and swallow me whole at any time.  It’s scary.  No matter how hard I push the two hemispheres of this bed together, the fault seems to get wider.  I fear becoming trapped down there and struggling impotently as the maids simply wedge the beds back together and remake the bed over the top of me in the morning.

I could ask to change rooms.

But that would be unseemly of a king.