The hunt for hotel a was a nightmare

The nightmare still comes back to me after all these years.
That’s because it was real.
It was more than 20 years ago, and I was bringing our twins home to Indiana from New Hampshire. For reasons that don’t matter, it was just the three of us.
And for reasons that will always matter, I had neglected to get a motel reservation for the trip back. The journey takes one long day and one not-so-long day, but you need a break in the middle.
Our plan, such as it was, involved stopping someplace in the middle of New York state, probably along what is called the “Southern Tier,” an expressway that allows cheapskates like me to avoid the tolls of the New York Thruway. It also makes it possible to avoid the traffic around Buffalo, always a plus.
We’d made the trip many times, but this time was different.
When I stopped at the town where we’d planned to spend the night, the hotel was booked. All the hotels in town were booked.
We pressed on and ran into the same thing 20 miles down the road, then another 20 miles down the road, then another 20. Dusk was descending. The time for deer to be on the move, crossing the highway, was approaching.
Finally, at what was probably our fourth or fifth stop, a helpful hotel clerk explained: “They’re racing at the Glen.”
That would be Watkins Glen, long a racetrack for Formula One and now for NASCAR. The clerk explained that we’d find no rooms for at least another 100 miles, heading west across New York.
By now, with too many hours of driving behind me and a couple of road-weary 13-year-olds in the car with me, that was truly a nightmare.
In the end, we drove all the way to Erie, Pa., from southern New Hampshire before we found a room. And it was the last room available. Equally exhausted travelers behind me at the counter were turned away.
All of that came back a few weeks ago as I made my way home — solo this time with Connie staying with our new granddaughter in Boston — along the same route. I hadn’t made reservations because I didn’t know when I was going to leave and I didn’t know how far I’d be traveling.
But the nightmare came back when I rolled into one of the same towns from all those years before. I knew a good restaurant there and figured it would make for a nice stop.
But a 3-on-3 basketball event, drawing from all over the state, changed all that.
There wasn’t a room to be had in town.
Heading back to the car, I was glad that I was facing this nightmare alone.
No problem, I told myself, there’s another town down the road. And it too, coincidentally, had a good restaurant. I pictured myself ordering dinner.
But when I rolled into town, things didn’t look good.
There were too many cars in the Holiday Inn Express parking lot, and when I stopped by the Best Western I learned that — again — the whole town was booked up.
This time, it wasn’t 3-on-3 basketball. It was the Italian Festival, I was told.
I trudged back to the car this time. Erie was still an hour and a half away. Night was beginning to fall, and I had no clue as to what my prospects might be.
So I drove on.
This time, it seemed, Lady Luck was with me. The Seneca Nation of Native Americans has established a huge, binging-and-bonging, garish, smoky, atrocity of a casino on the Southern Tier.
And where there’s a casino, there are hotel rooms.
You can bet on that.[[In-content Ad]]