My brilliant idea was to beat Labor Day traffic by leaving on Thursday afternoon. Our Florida exchangers were arriving at the airport before 3pm so we hoped to see them around 4pm and take off immediately afterwards.
Their flight was late, however, and we didn't get on the road until 5:30pm, which is just about the most difficult time to leave Manhattan. That, combined with "emergency" road work stretched our four hour drive to six, and that was just to get halfway there. We finally threw in the towel at 11pm and started looking for a roadside hotel.
When I need a hotel while driving my rule is to call first. I am not going to wander from parking lot to parking lot trying to find an empty room. Here is my system:
First, I look up my "best ranked hotels list" from Consumer Reports. I keep it as a memo on my handheld computer. Then I use my Global Positioning System "points of interest" feature to find all the hotels near the next town down the highway. We start our calls the top-ranked hotel on the Consumer Reports list, Then we move down the list until we find two non-smoking rooms at a decent price.
Unfortunately, we were in Indian territory. Indian casino territory, that is. Foxwoods is a hugely popular gambling complex run by the Pequot Tribal Nation. They had scheduled many events to lure people to the slot machines this holiday weekend. Every hotel was full. Midnight was approaching and one of our kids was unable to sleep and waking up the other one. We kept driving and dialing as we inched closer to our exchange home.
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