Once again, I’m attempting the difficult maneuver of getting a hotel coffeemaker to yield a satisfactory cup of tea, this time in the Hampton Inn outside Chicago. Greg and I are on one of our occasional quick trips here to enjoy goddaughter time and catch a little of that Chicagoland swank, if we can get it. But that’s why I have to keep trying Big Science to get the desired result. It ends up being more complicated than you’d think to get a decent cup of tea in a hotel.

As I mentioned back here, the problems are:

1. You can send for room service, but it costs a bloody fortune. A carafe of four little cups of tea might cost you $20. And knowing you’ve been totally ripped off will eliminate the bliss of even the finest cup of tea. Solution: Skip room service.
2. The in-house coffeemaker comes with a teabag or two, but it’s usually dreck. Solution: Buy some good tea once I get into town. (Like I really needed a reason to do that.)
3. The in-house coffee stuff doesn’t include much sweetener or any milk. Solution: Bringing sweetener isn’t that hard, but the milk thing is tricky. In this case, I brought a container of milk from the free breakfast and stowed it in the room fridge.
   
4. The in-house coffeemaker has been used for such a plethora of cups of coffee that not only is the carafe permanently redolent of coffee, but so is the filter bin, the water receptacle and probably the plug and the on/off switch. Now, I’m a drinker of the bean just as I am of the leaf, but tea with a hint of coffee isn’t tea anymore. It should be called something else, like “teafee” maybe. And then it should be poured down the drain, because it tastes awful. Solution: Don’t use the carafe, take out the filter holder and just hope for the best.
5. Hotels either provide ceramic coffee cups which, again, make tea taste like coffee, or they give you silly little styrofoam cups, which kill the ambiance. Solution: Bring your own teacup.

At about this point, you lose almost everyone. With all the other stuff you have to worry about before a trip, you have to try to stuff a teacup in your suitcase without it getting broken? And in these days when you know all your luggage is being x-rayed, are you supposed to NOT be paranoid thinking about what the baggage-screeners will make of someone transporting teacups all about the country willy-nilly?

So I had given up on the idea when we got here. Finding out that the room included a real fridge (as opposed to a mini-bar) started to raise my hopes, because it meant I could manage to keep milk cold without having weird adventures with either cup of milk in the ice bucket or complicated machinations with the mini-bar. (For those who don’t know, the mini-bars have a sensor under each item. Move that Snickers bar or tiny bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and if you don’t replace it in about one minute, you’ve bought it. So trying to insert your own items without buying any of theirs is sort of like a board game for grown-ups.)

But I still didn’t have a teacup. So I had written off my chance of unwinding with a good cuppa tea at eventide, until Greg and I happened across a liquidation sale at the Chicago Athletic Club. That may sound like an unlikely place to pick up something so elegant, but the important thing to mention is that the Chicago Athletic Club was one of those Old Money, old boy clubs with wingback chairs, cavernous fireplaces and dark wood everywhere. The Club had been there since the 1890’s, and now that they were going somewhere else, they needed to sell off roomsful of armoires, bookcases, chairs, sofas, desks, tables … and China. I suppose a person used to be able to eat and stay at these clubs if they wished, and the second floor had veritable mountains of the everyday China and the good China, all for about a buck apiece.

I’m not the type that goes mad for a bargain, but I hope I know an opportunity when I see one. The China was all really well-made — classic and understated in design, hefty and solid in its construction. I swept up a good teacup right away, and then just kept thinking of other pieces that have been missing from our tableware. Yes, why not get some more saucers, and a couple mid-size plates, and some small crocks, and a mess of spoons to replace all the ones that the spoon-fairies have spirited away over the past ten years?

All very sensible of me, I’m sure, but it meant that after I’d paid for my treasures, I had a problem. The sellers didn’t have any bags, and I couldn’t risk putting the teacup on top of all the other plates and stuff in the bookbag I was toting. So I had to walk the four blocks back to the car just carrying the teacup in one hand. I tried to look nonchalant and breezy, sashaying down Michigan Avenue with teacup in hand, but it really seemed kind of bizarre to me. Chicagoans are evidently used to seeing things much stranger than that, because no one even gave me a second look, but I was still oddly tempted to just start thrusting my teacup out in front of me and saying “Tea for the tourist? Tea, ma’am? Tea, sir? Just a little tea? Lipton’s will do,” just to see what would happen.

You never know. It’s a classy town. I might have gotten some good Formosa Oolong from a thoughtful native with a Thermos. But that didn’t happen, so I came back to the Hampton Inn to get my twilight cup of tea. I usually don’t have any this late, but under the circumstances, I felt like it was my destiny.

In the end, I can report that there wasn’t anything I could do with the in-room coffeemaker to keep it from making “teafee.” I had to skip it altogether and heat the water up in the microwave, which for some reason seems like cheating to me. (Where’s the art in pushing buttons to make the water hot? Where’s the challenge in waiting 1:30 minutes? It’s just so slipshod and bourgeois.)

But now I have overcome every obstacle, and I have before me a good cup of tea with milk and sweetener in a highly respectable, non-coffee-polluted teacup. Ahhhhh.

I wonder if I can get a digestive biscuit anywhere.