“A friend of a friend...”

In over 30 years living in Park City, we've seen our share of free-loaders sent over to us by some “friend” of ours, and ending up staying and eating for free at our place for some undetermined period of time.

I'm sure we don't stand alone in the universe of ski towns and this is an obvious downside of living in these kinds of places.

Since we're older though, we've decided to put an end to our activity of hotel and restaurant providers and let these surprise-visitors fend for themselves, using their creative talents on someone else or failing that, using their own credit cards.

This almost happened again to us yesterday when a friend of mine, who usually never calls me, left me a voice-mail message going like this: “Hello, a grand cousin of mine and her boyfriend are now in Salt Lake City, and I thought that since you hail from Haute-Savoie (my home region in France) I'm sure you'll be delighted to meet them; besides, I gave them your phone number so you're not surprised when they call you.”

Having been through that scheme many times before, I called my friend back and told them that I had gotten his message, and while I would have like to help theses youngsters, our household was no longer in the “hospitality business”.

One hour later we got the phone call from the couple. I asked them: “Do you have a mean of transportation?” They went, “No, we take buses and carpool.” Then, “How long do you plan to stay in Utah?” The responded, “We aren't sure; maybe one or two weeks...”

I had now plenty of information and a clear picture going forward; I said: “I have things planned for the next few days (true statement), I can't just help you on such short notice!”

They agreed and we left it at that. We've been through these situations before, where we had to house, feed and entertain people we didn't know, for days on end, just for the fun of it, a rather thankless task and we're now past that.

Times change, we get older, we learn a lot and, thank God, our memory is still good...