i have so much to share about our trip i thought i’d break it into two posts. plus, as i said, i haven’t finished editing our pictures, and i’ve been dying to tell you all about the motel we stayed at in albany.

saturday was an early day for us, as we were up before 4:30 a.m. to finish packing and head out to the atlanta airport. we arrived in new york city four hours before our train to albany was scheduled to leave, but only had two hours to spare by the time we got to penn station. we walked around a bit, grabbed some lunch and boarded our train for the 2.5 hour ride to albany. when we got in, we took a cab to the airport to pick up our rental car.

needless to say, we were exhausted by the time we got to our motel, the america’s best value inn. now, i know what you’re thinking based on the name, and let me say that i thought the same thing when i booked our room. however, with more than 50,000 people expected for the baseball hall of fame induction ceremony, every hotel room within 100 miles of cooperstown was booked up, so we were lucky to get any room in albany.

after dealing with the desk clerk not being able to find our reservation (funny how that happened on our honeymoon, too), we headed to our room to drop off our bags. we booked a non-smoking room. the room was filled with smoke. seriously. it was awful. of the four lamps in the room, only two worked. the sink had 12 vanity lights above it, and only two of those worked. after dinner that night we were about to pass out, so we went straight to bed. but, despite how tired we were, we couldn’t sleep because we could hear the people above us very loudly. i really doubt they were up there stomping on the floor, so the ceiling must have been extremely thin.

fast forward to sunday morning. we were up at 5:30 a.m. (have i mentioned yet that i am *not* a morning person??) to shower and head out to the hall of fame. the bath towels had holes in them. big holes. and the hair dryer? missing one of the prongs on the plug. it was not good, people, not good.

we booked it out of there and went to check out. joe told the desk clerk how terrible our room was. his response? “your credit card will be billed for your stay.”

obviously they didn’t care what condition their motel was in. then we asked for directions to cooperstown.

“look at a map.”

seriously? you’re in the service industry and that’s your idea of customer service?

luckily, another woman heading to cooperstown was in the lobby. she told us she had come down to complain earlier, but the line for complaints was so long she decided to come back later. and, she was nice enough to give us directions to cooperstown. it’s just too bad she obviously had no idea where cooperstown was…