Best Laid Plans

One of our favorite things to do is to visit a little town called Hudson, NY.  Warren Street is the commercial center of Hudson.  It runs about a mile through the town studded with antique stores and quaint restaurants.  Here in this little town is some of the best antique shopping and treasure-hunting I have ever known.  A popular source for interior designers, you can find unsurpassed collections of signature mid-century pieces, French country, or junkyard eclectic.  In addition, there are great secondhand bookstores, vintage jewelry shops, and wine merchants.

What Hudson is missing, is a good hotel.  My husband and I set off this weekend on a much anticipated antiquing adventure.  After considerable research, we settled on a hotel that promised “surprisingly nice accommodations despite its sketchy-looking exterior.”  With a confirmation email tucked away among our things, we headed the long way across Massachusetts toward the New York border.  The trip was 2 ½ hours door-to-door.  

In Hudson, we immediately found street parking (25 cents per hour!) and began our antique crawl.  I am convinced heaven is a long street like this, with an endless array of promising storefront windows each teasing you with mint-condition pieces you have seen only in books.   You know the shopping is great when you keep finding pieces for which you did not realize you were looking.  After five hours of 90+ degree heat, our car was full with an arts and crafts desk, two small end tables, art deco earrings, an assortment of secondhand art books, and some artisan liquors.  

Exhausted, we decided to check in to our hotel to clean up and rehydrate before our dinner reservation.  At the check in counter, the woman behind the desk said, somewhat rhetorically, “You know you have a smoking room?”  Quite sure the email confirmation specified ‘non-smoking,’ I shook my head.  We use an online service with a profile configured for non-smoking.  “That’s not possible,” I said.  She then proceeded to tell me that it was our fault because we did not provide an email for them to contact us.  They made no attempt to inform the booking agent.  And besides, she continued, we had only made the reservation a few days ago so what did we expect?

My husband pulled out the printed email confirmation for a reality check.  “Non-smoking” was clearly designated.  It did not matter.  They had no non-smoking rooms available.   She was not at fault, she insisted; it had to be the third party’s fault.  Or our fault for not booking directly with the hotel.   “In any case,” she said, “we air out the rooms when people smoke in them so it will probably be fine.”  She handed us a key so we could see the room for ourselves. 

We went upstairs and down the long hall to our appointed room.  Putting the key in the lock, we cracked the door slightly, still standing in the hall.  Before releasing the doorknob, the waft of smoke assaulted our senses, causing my throat to knot and my eyes to water.  My tongue felt as if I had licked an ashtray.  My husband and I turned toward each other and agreed nonverbally; we released the door and let it slam shut.

Back at the front desk we returned the key, explaining that the room was uninhabitable.   She offered, as if a major concession on her part, to cancel our reservation “at no charge.”  Since it was well before the 6pm cancellation deadline, it was the least she could do.  Literally, the least.  It is one thing for a hotel to screw up a reservation, but she certainly did not need to scold us to cover for poor customer service.

It was easy enough for us to drive home that night.  We arrived at the Hudson restaurant early for our dinner reservation, capping off a fun day with good food and live music, and consoling ourselves that we would sleep comfortably in our own bed.   The drive back across the state had an enchanted feel, as each town we passed along the Mass Pike was having a fireworks celebration.  First the rockets’ red glare would be on the left, and then the bombs would burst in the air on the right.

The next morning, we awoke to familiar surroundings, but the house possessed a strange and curious silence.  We were slow to realize that there had been a power failure at some point, no doubt the product of electrical overload from the sweltering heat.  As we embarked upon our hastily arranged Sunday agenda, we realized that our cars were now locked in the garage behind a non-functional electric door.  I remembered that our door system had a release latch, designed to disengage the door from the lift mechanism on just such occasions.  My husband pulled the latch, but the door was locked in place.  It seems that the release was designed to close an open door, but not the other way around.

The last power failure we had was in October; we were without power for five days.  With this memory top of mind, liberating our cars from the garage became a sacred mission.   We unscrewed nuts from bolts and dismantled the lift mechanism so that it did not prevent the door from opening.  It still would not budge.  Then we realized that the problem was the weight of the 2-car door itself.  We changed tactics:  I pulled the door from the bottom while my husband pulled the cord from the top.  We did this several times, only to have it fall back down the track, slamming shut on the garage floor.  After a full hour of ups and downs akin to an episode of Laurel and Hardy, my husband held on to the cord while the door was in the raised position and yelled, “Quick!  Back the cars out!”  My daughter and I each jumped into a car and backed out, hoping that the one thin cord my husband was using to hold the door in the elevated position would not snap just as we passed under the door itself.

As soon as we had cleared the threshold of the garage, my husband let go and the door slammed shut again.  My daughter and I parked and locked the cars in the driveway, then entered the house through the front door while my husband came in through the mudroom.   “That was way more work than it should have been,” my husband said.  At that very moment, there was a crank of sounds from all over the house.  Lights flashed on as the air conditioner compressor started up.   The power came back on!

That was an hour of life we will never get back.  It seemed an apt finale to a thwarted weekend getaway.  As we laughed at the serendipity of it all, we realized that the mishaps made the weekend.  It was the unexpected that we will remember most.