Crowne Heights

We're blogging from a Howard Johnson Hotel in Brooklyn. Priceline has often been kind to us in the past; this time we got our comeuppance. One Tripadvisor review said something to the effect of, "I only stayed here because I had to attend a funeral."

It's located in an area inappropriately called Crowne Heights. "Do you mind my asking how you found this place?" said our first taxi driver, on Tuesday night. The taxi driver on Wednesday was more blunt, devoting ten minutes (of our approximately one hour drive from Manhattan) to explaining why it was a bad place to live. We assured him we have no intention of moving to the corner of New York, but he persisted.

The hotel room itself is cozy, once you get past the fact that no one mans the front desk and that there are curious stains on the phone. We rented a DVD player, thereby crippling the TV (the remote only works for one feature or the other). This allowed us to watch half of Enchanted on our first night here. On our second night, I stayed up editing some very poor TOEFL-like material. That came to very little - a grim episode that I won't relate here, since it was neither mild nor absurd, just aggravating.

To its credit, the hotel features a friendly breakfast manager who runs across the street for fresh bagels.

Tomorrow night, we're staying at a Hampton Inn in Columbus, Ohio - provided for free by the university, which is wining, dining, housing and flying Cynthia in order to recruit her for a Master's degree program there. We're pretty sure it'll be New York, but checking out all the options sounds like a good idea, and it gives us a chance to see Columbus for the first (and only?) time. It's not too far from our alpaca in Indiana.

I think the sun is about to rise. That means it's time to crawl into bed and see about securing some pillow real estate.