Don't Travel on "Fourth of July" Weekend

It was a long hot drive from Opus 40 to Buffalo, but we managed it somehow. The only problem was, there was no room in any hotel anywhere in Buffalo. We were outraged. It was only the first of July, after all! But it was a Saturday night, and maybe some sports thing was going on there? Puny little fireworks were going up in various shopping mall parking lots. And none of the hotels had any vacancies. What was even funnier was that none of them had NO VACANCY signs either--presumably because the event of having no vacancies was such a rare one. Everything from Microtel to Holiday Inn, from Ramada to the Tally-ho-tel…totally booked, but we had to park and walk in each time to find that out. Actually we got clever after a while and realized that a car pulling out of a parking lot at 10 PM probably meant a disappointed fellow hotel-seeker.

For some reason, the whole thing really made me miss my bro, who until a month ago was living in Buffalo. Probably this was for selfish reasons--after all, if he were still living there we could have stayed with him!!--but that in itself would have been really great. Sad as it sounds, I don't believe I've seen him for almost a year. We just keep missing each other during vacations.

Anyway, we got grimly back on the freeway and started driving away from Buffalo, gnashing our teeth and feeling really sleepy, grubby, and tired. Eventually some Podunk town 45 minutes or so outside Buffalo, though still all booked up, had a sign for some hotel in some even more Podunk town where we went since we were getting pretty desperate. It was an awful room--a smoking room with 2 double beds. The bathroom lights didn't work. The AC was glacial. Of course there was no wireless, free or otherwise. We wouldn't have wanted a free breakfast even if they had been offering it. We kind of wavered between being infuriated and being grateful, and then fell asleep.

The moral of the story, I suppose, is that even if the Fourth of July is not until the middle of next week, don't think it's safe to travel on the weekend. Or at least call ahead first!