Lodging

We have some friends who like to "drive through the night" to save on travel expenses - that is not our style! We are all about being frugal, but on the one trip we "drove through" on, we discovered that sleep is pretty important to us.

What we usually do is buy a room through Priceline.  This sometimes works out alright, sometimes flops, and sometimes exceeds our expectations.  Here is how we do it - as we get close to where we'd like to stop we go onto the Priceline website and select the city - they usually offer a list of nearby places to expand the search and sometimes that works for us, but usually we are pretty narrow about where we will stop.  We pick the highest star level available and bid $56.  If the highest star level is a 2, we will bid lower, but usually that is a good guess for a 2 1/2 star hotel.  Typically they reject that bid and we bump up to $61 and add an option.  It is actually a better strategy to select only one area on the first round because you have to add an option on the 2nd bid and that is an easy one to do without lowering the star rating.  We got all our hotels this trip for $61 or under, but that is not always the case.

Our first night we got a Ramada and it was very nice and clean - the breakfast area was meticulously maintained and had a going up into the mountains kind of feel to it.

Our 2nd night we got a Microtel and possibly overpaid - we certainly didn't get an incredible deal, but it still seemed like a good deal because the room didn't have any odor and the desk clerk immediately noticed we had a baby and offered to get us a crib.  Three funny things about this place - one wall was all mirrors, the tv was placed on top of a wardrobe nearly touching the ceiling, and the attentive desk clerk was also simultaneously playing a game on his iPhone while he got the crib and helped us into the room.  Talk about multitasking!  Fortunately it was so late, I was giddy and thought it was all funny.

We stayed in a hotel in Columbus, but that one doesn't fit into this post.

The 3rd place was sort of a dive.  It was a Days Inn and I have stayed in worse places, but we overpaid even the advertised price, the room stank, the carpet was dirty, etc. etc.  The saving grace of this place is that the area had just had an emergence of 17-year cicadas and the kids thought they were really cool.  So we paid for the educational experience!

"Look deep into my eyes..."

Our last night on the road we stopped in Ocala, Florida and with our first bid got a 3 star hotel - The Ocala Hilton.  We had planned to get up early and get home a.s.a.p., but as soon as I looked at their website, I knew that wouldn't happen - they have a resident Clydesdale!

Annalise and Buddy

They also had a hot tub, so we took time to swim and see Buddy.  Buddy had two friends who were Thoroughbreds - evidently old ones, they were all very mild tempered horses.  They have bags of horse treats in the lobby to feed them.

It is probably good the Hilton was last because it left us with a favorable impression of Priceline.  And it was a fun unexpected thing to do at the end of a great trip.