The vacation was just going too well. We had a wonderful time in DC, got to meet 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!