Anyone who has traveled much always comes away with some great stories. Tales you can’t tell if you stay close to home.

I’ve slept for days in the woods with nothing but a sleeping bag all the way up to five star European hotels and everything in between. But what happened in an old 50’s hotel in Cortez, CO takes the cake.

The Sleeping Ute Motel in Cortez, CO. Don’t bother. It seemed innocuous enough. A younger couple bought it a few years ago and have been rebuilding it. The rooms were nice enough. Sheets clean. The place was really quiet and close to good coffee. Important for the check list.

I had put my AirPods on the bedside table before I went to sleep. At some point in the middle of the night, a very familiar sound came from the wall behind my head. It startled me awake and I must have knocked the Buds on the floor. The sound behind the wall was distinctly rodent in nature. A large rodent. There wasn’t anything to do so I eventually fell asleep.

As I was packing in the morning, I started looking for my AirPods. Nowhere. There’s a handy little feature in “Find My” that lets you find the pods by playing a sound on the phone. Normally it’s a pretty loud sound, so much so they tell you to remove the buds from your ears before looking for them. Duh. When I turned the sound on it was very faint. I thought maybe they had fallen under the bed somewhere. I pulled the bed away from the wall and found a very distinct rodent hole in the wall. The pod sound was coming from INSIDE the wall. No doubt. Very faint but deep in the wall. The little Fucker had stolen them both and packed them far away from getting to them.

The jokes on him though. I still have the case and he can’t recharge them.

Yeah. No shit. True story.