![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This is the trip that never ends...
The vacation was just going too well. We had a wonderful time in DC, got to meet ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
abyssinia4077 and her host, and generally had a fairly awesome time. So, of course, the other shoe had to drop. And it just kept falling ...
I'm still in New York. Yes, I was supposed to be back in Alaska yesterday. I'm rebooked on a flight out tomorrow afternoon and hopefully, this time I'll make it. (We're leaving so ridiculously early that I'll probably end up waiting for several hours at the airport, but I DON'T CARE.)
What happened was traffic. It took us four and a half hours to get from the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel to JFK Airport. The distance is something like 20 miles (if that). I kept thinking it was just me, being from out of town, not realizing how awful the traffic is -- but I ended up in line at the airport with a bunch of local people who had missed their flights, too. I overheard one guy say that it was the worst traffic he'd ever seen. I stood in a long, long line only to find that, because I had booked my flight through a different airline than the one handling this leg of the trip, I had to call the original airline and have them change it.
Aargh.
After an hour or so on an airport pay phone, I got myself rebooked on a Dec. 31 flight. At this point, it was about 7:30 p.m. and we were frustrated, exhausted and (in my case) heartsick about not getting home. (I love my sister, I've had an awesome trip, but I'm really ready to be home.) We'd been fighting traffic all day, and we hadn't eaten sinceabyssinia4077 fed us around noon, but we were both so sick of struggling with the traffic that we just decided to drive north of the city, find an affordable hotel and get something to eat.
Now, there's something I need to explain about me and my sister. We can't find hotels. I don't know why. Traveling by myself or with other people, I have absolutely no problem at all -- in any significantly-sized town, or on an interstate, it doesn't usually take long to locate a hotel. Apparently the same is true of her when she's traveling by herself. But put us together, and we're hopeless. We once drove around Montreal for three hours looking for hotels. And it was the same damn thing last night. We weren't having much luck on the freeway, so we decided to get off onto Rt. 9 (which runs up the Hudson River valley) assuming that we ought to find a hotel or motel or something. No luck. Seriously. Not to mention that the whole road is about 30 mph because it's all tiny little towns ... none of them big enough to have a motel APPARENTLY.
The trouble with this sort of thing is that we tend to get more and more tired and desperate, so we wind up leaving the road and driving around small towns plaintively hunting for hotels, which only costs us more time and makes us more tired and frustrated. Plus, it was getting later and later, and all the restaurants were closing.
We'd just about given up on hotels *or* restaurants when we ran across a 24-hour cafe that turned out to have fantastic food, in a little town called Croton-on-Hudson. Since we liked the town and the cafe, we asked about hotels and finally located one up the road. It was a little (well, okay, a lot) overpriced for how generally run-down the lobby looked, but we were exhausted and just wanted to stop moving and sleep.
Warning sign #1 was the clerk's offhand comment, when he gave us the key, that our room didn't have any numbers on the door. ("But it's okay, it's right next to 127, you won't have any trouble finding it.")
I have stayed in some fleabag motels in my time, but this one is absolutely the rock-bottom of them all. Every surface in the room was sticky -- not just a little sticky, but like someone had poured Coke all over them. (We desperately tried to convince ourselves that it was nothing worse than Coke.) The carpet was so filthy and threadbare that I ended up wearing my socks whenever I wasn't on the bed (and afterwards wrapping them in a separate plastic bag so they wouldn't contaminate the rest of my luggage). We put all our luggage up on a chair so that it wouldn't get infested with anything. Since the bathroom, surprisingly, seemed halfway clean (except for the sticky floor) I gritted my teeth and took a quick shower. When I stepped out, my sister said, "You HAVE to see the phone," and held up the receiver. The mouthpiece had obviously been vomited on (and all over the keypad and the rest of the phone) and nobody had cleaned it up; it had just been allowed to dry that way.
We tossed around the idea of leaving, but it was midnight and we were undressed and just wanted to sleep. Our efforts to avoid touching the sheets and pillows (any more than we had to) must have been hilarious; we both ended up sleeping on our backs, trying not to move and imagining phantom bedbugs.
The pièce de résistance was being woken up at 3 a.m. by either a domestic disturbance or a drug/prostitution deal gone wrong in the parking lot right outside our door -- we couldn't understand much, but there was a whole lot of screaming, profanity and slamming of car and room doors.
Not the best hotel experience ever.
Today we explored New York (on foot this time, not car) and then had another "Laurel and Hardy do New York" experience trying to find a hotel before we finally found one off I-95. (We took a look at the outside, thought "It's out of our price range" and then "Oh, screw it", and after last night, it is SO worth it. The desk clerk gave us a bag of warm cookies when we checked in! I like nice hotels. And for what we're getting, it really isn't that expensive at all. It's not that much more expensive than Hotel Hudson Hell, as a matter of fact.)
And now the weather report tells me that it's supposed to be snowing and raining tomorrow. If I miss THIS flight, after all of this, I may cry.
But right now, I have complimentary wireless and a hotel that actually cleans its rooms (and has an awesome flat-screen TV! And cookies!), so life could be worse.
Edit: And we're watching Leverage on our huge hotel TV and it's great! Very fast-paced and well-written. I like!
abyssinia4077 and her host, and generally had a fairly awesome time. So, of course, the other shoe had to drop. And it just kept falling ...I'm still in New York. Yes, I was supposed to be back in Alaska yesterday. I'm rebooked on a flight out tomorrow afternoon and hopefully, this time I'll make it. (We're leaving so ridiculously early that I'll probably end up waiting for several hours at the airport, but I DON'T CARE.)
What happened was traffic. It took us four and a half hours to get from the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel to JFK Airport. The distance is something like 20 miles (if that). I kept thinking it was just me, being from out of town, not realizing how awful the traffic is -- but I ended up in line at the airport with a bunch of local people who had missed their flights, too. I overheard one guy say that it was the worst traffic he'd ever seen. I stood in a long, long line only to find that, because I had booked my flight through a different airline than the one handling this leg of the trip, I had to call the original airline and have them change it.
Aargh.
After an hour or so on an airport pay phone, I got myself rebooked on a Dec. 31 flight. At this point, it was about 7:30 p.m. and we were frustrated, exhausted and (in my case) heartsick about not getting home. (I love my sister, I've had an awesome trip, but I'm really ready to be home.) We'd been fighting traffic all day, and we hadn't eaten since
abyssinia4077 fed us around noon, but we were both so sick of struggling with the traffic that we just decided to drive north of the city, find an affordable hotel and get something to eat.Now, there's something I need to explain about me and my sister. We can't find hotels. I don't know why. Traveling by myself or with other people, I have absolutely no problem at all -- in any significantly-sized town, or on an interstate, it doesn't usually take long to locate a hotel. Apparently the same is true of her when she's traveling by herself. But put us together, and we're hopeless. We once drove around Montreal for three hours looking for hotels. And it was the same damn thing last night. We weren't having much luck on the freeway, so we decided to get off onto Rt. 9 (which runs up the Hudson River valley) assuming that we ought to find a hotel or motel or something. No luck. Seriously. Not to mention that the whole road is about 30 mph because it's all tiny little towns ... none of them big enough to have a motel APPARENTLY.
The trouble with this sort of thing is that we tend to get more and more tired and desperate, so we wind up leaving the road and driving around small towns plaintively hunting for hotels, which only costs us more time and makes us more tired and frustrated. Plus, it was getting later and later, and all the restaurants were closing.
We'd just about given up on hotels *or* restaurants when we ran across a 24-hour cafe that turned out to have fantastic food, in a little town called Croton-on-Hudson. Since we liked the town and the cafe, we asked about hotels and finally located one up the road. It was a little (well, okay, a lot) overpriced for how generally run-down the lobby looked, but we were exhausted and just wanted to stop moving and sleep.
Warning sign #1 was the clerk's offhand comment, when he gave us the key, that our room didn't have any numbers on the door. ("But it's okay, it's right next to 127, you won't have any trouble finding it.")
I have stayed in some fleabag motels in my time, but this one is absolutely the rock-bottom of them all. Every surface in the room was sticky -- not just a little sticky, but like someone had poured Coke all over them. (We desperately tried to convince ourselves that it was nothing worse than Coke.) The carpet was so filthy and threadbare that I ended up wearing my socks whenever I wasn't on the bed (and afterwards wrapping them in a separate plastic bag so they wouldn't contaminate the rest of my luggage). We put all our luggage up on a chair so that it wouldn't get infested with anything. Since the bathroom, surprisingly, seemed halfway clean (except for the sticky floor) I gritted my teeth and took a quick shower. When I stepped out, my sister said, "You HAVE to see the phone," and held up the receiver. The mouthpiece had obviously been vomited on (and all over the keypad and the rest of the phone) and nobody had cleaned it up; it had just been allowed to dry that way.
We tossed around the idea of leaving, but it was midnight and we were undressed and just wanted to sleep. Our efforts to avoid touching the sheets and pillows (any more than we had to) must have been hilarious; we both ended up sleeping on our backs, trying not to move and imagining phantom bedbugs.
The pièce de résistance was being woken up at 3 a.m. by either a domestic disturbance or a drug/prostitution deal gone wrong in the parking lot right outside our door -- we couldn't understand much, but there was a whole lot of screaming, profanity and slamming of car and room doors.
Not the best hotel experience ever.
Today we explored New York (on foot this time, not car) and then had another "Laurel and Hardy do New York" experience trying to find a hotel before we finally found one off I-95. (We took a look at the outside, thought "It's out of our price range" and then "Oh, screw it", and after last night, it is SO worth it. The desk clerk gave us a bag of warm cookies when we checked in! I like nice hotels. And for what we're getting, it really isn't that expensive at all. It's not that much more expensive than Hotel Hudson Hell, as a matter of fact.)
And now the weather report tells me that it's supposed to be snowing and raining tomorrow. If I miss THIS flight, after all of this, I may cry.
But right now, I have complimentary wireless and a hotel that actually cleans its rooms (and has an awesome flat-screen TV! And cookies!), so life could be worse.
Edit: And we're watching Leverage on our huge hotel TV and it's great! Very fast-paced and well-written. I like!
no subject
Be safe. I hope you get home tomorrow.
BTW - I love Leverage. Very fun show.
no subject
The hotel *has* to show up in something I write, one of these days. I didn't go through all that for nothing!
no subject
no subject
no subject
At least you've your sister with you! And Leverage! I keep meaning to watch it. I think TNT has all the eps on their site for free...just FYI.
no subject
Hope you make it home tomorrow. :)
no subject
no subject
Hope you get back safe & sound, crossing fingers for you!
no subject
Double bummer on the flight - what traffic mess! After a long vacation all I want is home too.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Probably why I like fanfic so much. The networks may provide the lovely actors but can never deliver as good a story as my flist regularly does. (SGA most certainly included)
Sorry to hear of your travel horrors. Back in my rock'n'roll band days we stayed in some of the most disgusting dives ever... when we weren't sleeping in the equipment van =)
Oh, the good old days. =/
no subject
no subject
Ouch - it never fun to miss a flight. It is even worse now because it so hard to rebook because the airlines have so many planes that are 100% full.
I have never had that bad a hotel experience. I have stayed in some cheap hotels - but thankfully they were clean. And as you said if you can find a way to work that hotel into a story - then it won't have been for nothing.
Good luck on getting out of there tomorrow. With any luck the rain will be where you are and the snow will be further north...
no subject
Will keep everything crossed for safe, speedy and decent journeys today.
no subject
Ew. I once spent a night at an aquaintance's who didn't seem to think too much of cleaning, and I was so grossed out that I could barely fall asleep. That was nothing against this hotel room. Vomit on the... eechh!
Good luck with catching this flight!
(At least you got a really good story out of all this. ;)
no subject
Hey, but I bet you can use it in a fic!
no subject
My worst experience was in Rome - an apartment rental, not a hotel. Absolutely filthy, crawling with bugs and it had the weirdest furnishing. The table top was a grave stone.
Hope you're home safe and sound when you read this. Happy New Year!
no subject
And yay! Leverage! Come, join usssss on the dark side, it's fun! :D
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
Sorry you missed the flights due to bad weather and hideous traffic. I hope you make it home soon. *hugs*
Never seen Leverage, what's it about? Might have to hunt the online watching sites to see if I can grab and ep or two - see if I like it or not!
EDIT: The motel not the hotel, oops!
no subject
It's a combination of things I saw in the first and second episodes.
1) The pilot was directed by Dean Deviln, one of the guys behind Independence Day. He's a byword for bad filmmaking in my opinion. The only film he and Roland Emmerich made that I can even enjoy is Stargate, and that's mostly because it was saved by Kurt Russel and David Spader.
2) Cliches, from The Most Violent Man Ever (who's a total sweetheart the rest of the time) to the 'you can't work with these thieves, they're all loners!' bit.
3) Some writing that made me wince.
- In the opening of the first episode, the very first few lines are really poorly handled exposition that's forced on the audience to get them up to speed.
- The Super Thief, as a little girl, blew up her family home in retribution for her cardboard cutout abusive father having taken away her stuffed bunny rabbit.
- The Most Violent Man ever can apparently dodge bullets and kill several Serbian men in the same amount of time it takes them to empty their clips at his head.
- This team of Best Leader Ever + Best Thieves Ever know so little about their respective clients that they can easily be duped, and are in the very first episode.
- A whole bunch of 'clever' writing, like the IT scam and the computer guy saying 'I told him to say that. It's a computer thing.' which are really obvious winks at the audience.
Really, I love watching Timothy Hutton do anything, and Gina Bellman is awesome and has been since Jekyll. The rest of the cast is pretty good too, it's just the sheer amount of dumb that I saw in the show that made me stop watching.
For the record, what made me stop watching was seeing them do the Super Meeting Room Briefing, with the Computer System To End All Computer Systems, and the tech guy ended by saying "But here's the best part! A Direct TV HD Total Sports Package!" (TM)
Could they have forced that advertising any further into the ass of the show?
no subject
You know, if you were far enough up, you might have been in Sleepy Hollow country (Tarrytown). Any headless horseman sightings? :)
And Happy New Year!
no subject
On another note, I went to school in Ithaca so it's crazy to read about places in someone else's journal that I'm very familiar with :) Thanks for sharing!
no subject
*hugs from a jaded NYer who is hiding in her living room far far away from midtown*
no subject
Of course, this meant that we got to the airport with something like four hours to kill, so we took the subway and explored Brooklyn on foot for a while.
I think you're quite right -- I am *never* trying that drive to the airport again, at least not without allowing a lot more than two hours!
no subject
I truly don't know why we had so much trouble finding a hotel, because you'd *think* there would be hotels all over the place, but we couldn't find them! Where is the Holiday Inn? We found the park-and-rides very convenient, and were thinking about doing something similar the next time we're out that way ... only without the awful hotel experience. XD
no subject
Leverage
Fannish connections: The ex-insurance investigator is Timothy Hutton, from A&E's Nero Wolfe series, the Muscle is Christian Kane from Angel The TV Series, and the con artist played Sally on Coupling and was in the Jekyll & Hyde miniseries.
Re: Leverage
no subject
Hope you make it back safely and quickly! At least you have a better hotel now!
no subject