Several days ago, friends of Life in the Boomer Lane and Now Husband dropped their son off at a summer camp in upstate New York and headed down to the Poconos in PA. $179 Groupon coupon in hand, their destination was one of the Honeymoon Resorts of the Poconos, famous for heart-shaped pools and champagne glass hot tubs in each suite.
In case any history lovers are reading this post, the first inhabitants of the Pocono Mountains were the Delaware, Iroquois, Shawnee, Minisink, Lenape and Paupack Indians. A treaty was signed with the Minisink Indians to acquire all the land from the Delaware River to as far north as a man could walk in three days. The Minisinks claimed they had been cheated, as the Brits made them walk in ill-fitting shoes so they couldn't get very far.
The Minisink retaliated in the only rational way available to people who have been walking for days in bad shoes: terror and massacres. In spite of all this mayhem, the Poconos were eventually tamed and became a vacation destination for families. In 1945, the first honeymoon lodge was created for returning GIs and their new brides. It would take another 18 years for the first heart-shaped bath tub to be installed in one of the honeymoon lodges. The champagne glass hot tub and world-class entertainment like Polyester and the Funk Machine weren't far behind.
LBL's friends, in their 50s with high-profile jobs and histories of having traveled all over the planet for both business and pleasure, are most likely in a slightly different category than many of the young honeymooners from the northeast who stay at the lodges. LBL asked them how their experience was. "Well, it was a little bit strange," they said, "but we had the Groupon. I mean, you can't beat $179 a night, can you?" LBL had to agree. She had just returned from Brooklyn, where the nightly rate was $300 and the walls and ceiling weren't even covered with mirrors.
Because LBL does deep and meaningful research for each blog post she writes (as long as it can be done while wearing her at-home lounge wear and drinking her coffee), she tried to find a representative of any of the tribes that were originally in the area in order to ask them what they thought of everything that happened to their original territory in the last 100 years or so. She finally found a descendant of one of the original Minisinks who was given the ill-fitting shoes to wear while staking out Minisink territory.
"My great-great-great grandfather tried to break those shoes in for months, but never could. He finally gave up and sold them on eBay. Made a pretty penny because of the historic significance. Then turned around and bought a air of really comfy Orthaheel slip ons. So it all worked out OK in the end."