Travel is a lot like life

Travel is a lot like life. One minute it can be amazingly beautiful and the next it can be difficult and unpredictable. I arrived at Newark airport at about 12:30am, and when I got to my hotel (SpringHill Suites), I was told there was a problem with some of the rooms, and they couldn’t honour my reservation, because the hotel was full. Instead they had arranged a room at the Quality Inn in Lyndhurst. Wherever that was. They promised to refund the room charge (something frugal guy likes) and a taxi would bring me back in the morning.

This part of New Jersey has a reputation for being gritty and tough. Beautiful isn’t a word that you’d use to describe this area. I tried to get my bearings as the taxi sped along a two-lane road at 120 km/hour.  Were we going west or north? I wasn’t sure. After about 20 minutes, we turned into the Quality Inn’s parking lot.

Not surprising considering the early hour, the lobby was empty. A tallish man, probably in his early thirties and working the front desk, came out from a small room. He wore glasses and wouldn’t have looked out of place had he been in my high school’s camera club. He seemed about as excited to be there as I was. 

The two-level hotel had a musty, well used smell to it. In some of the hallways the wallpaper was peeling. The hotel seemed past its best before date. I imagined a large stamp on the side of the hotel...best before 1989. And it didn’t look any more impressive in the daylight. In fact, they could probably bulldoze the hotel, and no one would notice it was gone.

I located my room and opened the door. I was met by the kind of smell one would have found in an empty bingo hall 30 years ago. Then I spied the ashtray on the desk. Lovely, I thought. I didn’t think they still have smoking rooms in hotels. Later, over a breakfast of dry croissants, I saw a cigarette vending machine in the hotel restaurant. What decade was I in?

The washroom fixtures in the room were mismatched. The white toilet clashed with the coffee coloured bathtub that looked as if it was an original vintage. The wall coverings were off-white in colour, but I didn’t know if that was how it might have looked when the hotel opened, or if years of cigarette smoke had turned it that way. It reminded me of the kind of place a fugitive would have been holed up in a Hollywood movie. Admittedly, I have stayed in worse places, but I did pull down the bed cover and sheets to make sure the bed was clean.

I was assured that a taxi would come at 9:45 am, allowing enough time to catch a shuttle bus for the hour-long trip across the city from Newark to Kennedy airport. With no taxi in sight at 10:05, I called the hotel and asked when it would be coming. Oh, we’ll send one out now. At 10:30 a driver arrived and 20 minutes later dropped me off at Newark airport.

I went inside to the ground transportation counter to get a bus ticket. “The next bus is at 11:00,” a woman behind the counter said. What perfect timing I thought. She asked for my name and then called the bus company. Getting off the phone, she looked at me and said this bus was full, but there is another at noon. “When is your flight,” she queried. When I told her 3:00PM, she said it was best I take a taxi. I smiled and laughed to myself inside. Taking a taxi from Newark to Kennedy Airport was the very thing I had been trying to avoid. Five years ago, I had been in a not too different situation. My Qatar Airways flight into Newark had to do a go-around on approach to the airport, and then a further 30 minute delay on the ground forced me then to abandon any chance I had of taking the cheaper option of a train into Manhattan and then another to JFK. I remember the taxi costing more than $120.

Standing in the taxi queue outside the terminal I couldn’t help but smile. “That’ll be $86 for the taxi and $30 for road tolls,” a woman said to me. Emptying my wallet into the hands of the driver an hour later, I was reminded how travel can be unpredictable, but like life itself you just have to roll with it.