With the good folks leaving on the Sleazy cruise soon, I thought I'd
repost some thoughts I once had about how to work around that annoying
"honor" part of an Honor Bar in your cabin. I'd love to be joining you
this year, but George had banned me from his Sleazy cruises for a while.
The suspension expires in 2007, so perhaps he'll let Mrs. Nonnymus and
me come along next year. We're already booked on his GGC2007. In the
meantime, I wish you all the very best, and hope that you will be able
to maintain the spirit of quiet dignity, temperance and social reserve
Mrs. Nonnymus and I have imparted to previous Sleazy cruises.
--
---Nonnymus---
In the periodic table, as in politics,
the unstable elements tend to hang out on
the far left, with some to the right as well.
----------repost------------
Honor Bars
There has been much discussion about the desirability and ethics of
taking a bottle of liquor along
in your suitcase when traveling. While many do it to hold down the cost
of liquor in hotels and
aboard cruise ships, others object to violating the "honor code" of most
facilities, which prefer to sell
you individual drinks from their own bars. Handicapped travelers have an
even more difficult time
getting a drink, since it might involve having to get dressed and into a
wheel chair or asking for
assistance in finding the bar in a strange hotel or aboard a ship.
To "bridge over" the question of buying your drinks at a hotel/ship bar,
or having your own liquor
in the room, an Honor Bar is frequently an option. For those of you who
have not encountered one,
the Honor Bar is a small, locked, refrigerator or cabinet in a hotel
room or ship's cabin that is
well-stocked with individual bottles of various liquors, wines, mixers,
beer, various nuts, snacks,
candy bars and bottled water. If you desire something, you use your room
key or Honor Bar key to
open the cabinet, remove what you want, and write what you've taken
down onto an inventory
sheet of the Honor Bar. Occasionally, the inventory is handled
electronically. When checking out, you present the inventory sheet to
the front desk or purser, paying for what you've consumed. The honor bar
is restocked daily by room service.
Having stayed in many places with HONOR BARS, here are a few tricks I've
come up with that might
save the traveler a few dollars on the next trip or cruise.
When we travel, two favorite things in my suitcase are brown (combine
red and green) food coloring and superglue. Then, when confronted with
an Honor Bar, its very easy to open the little
bottle and pour yourself a drink. The trick is to refill the bottle with
water, add a couple of drops of
the food coloring and place the top back on. To conceal that the lid has
been opened, hold the
broken-off part by the lid and add a drop of superglue to the tab.
Nobody will ever know that the
bottle has been "used."
I've also had success without using the superglue, by rearranging the
bottles, with the "refilled"
one back behind one that hasn't been used. Without naming names, I
passed this information on
to an anonymous friend from Fort Lauderdale a few months back, just
before a trip. When he returned, however,
he told me that he'd followed my directions explicitly, but had the
humiliation of being
caught!! I asked him what had gone wrong and he replied, "I used the
food coloring just
as you said, but the maid noticed the bottled water and gin had turned
brown."
The moral here to be sure which bottles normally contain a brown
liquor and which contain a clear liquor.
Other creative ways to save money with the honor bar:
Drain beer from cans by using a hypodermic needle hammered in from the
bottom. Refill with water,
and seal with ear wax.
Carefully open candy bars, eat the candy, then insert a pre-cut piece of
wood to simulate the candy.
Seal with superglue or double sided tape.
Open the seal of a bottle with a razor knife. Remove it carefully and
set it aside. Remove the aluminum cap in the normal fashion (teeth) then
drink the bottle. Replace the cap, reinstall the seal, then cover up
the cut with black shoe polish.
If the bottle isn't a good, fresh wine, it may have one of those pesky
cork stoppers. Just use the handle of your pocket knife to hammer it
down into the bottle. Then, drink the wine (never right out of the
bottle or you might choke on the cork) and then refill it with water.
The cork will float to the top when
the bottle is full. Then invert the bottle and whack the sucker down
onto the linoleum to "seat" the cork. Replace the seal, and use the shoe
polish to conceal the cut.
Walmart sells very large cans of smoked horse meat "jerky" strips as dog
treats under the Old Roy
brand. They look and smell exactly like regular beef jerky, and our
houseguests love it. By taking along some on a trip, bags of real beef
jerky can be relieved of their contents, with the dog strips making a
very believable substitute.
(For those of you who are grandparents and on a limited budget, keeping
a good supply of the doggie
jerky strips at home gives you a little snack for the grandkids as
well. Being kids, they never seem to notice that it isn't real beef jerky.)
Using a razor blade, bags of nuts, popcorn, chips, Fritos and even beef
jerky can be slit, and just a small quantity removed from each bag. When
the slit resealed with superglue, the shortage is seldom noticed
by subsequent "buyers."
My personal favorite is to take a large bag of peanuts along on a
cruise. Then, when I find good nuts in the Honor Bar, such as Cashews
and Macadamia Nuts in the little bags, I slit the bag open, dump out
the nuts and refill it with peanuts. Since subsequent users are usually
a bit tipsy by the time they
get the "munchies," they fail to notice the substitution, when properly
resealed with superglue or tape. |