New England trip - photos & journal - Part II

From Cara's journal:

• Friday, 10/6/89 - mileage 73426 - 1:02 PM - Interstate 90 - Service Station

We are once again on the road heading for Cooperstown.  We are on a mission: locating Dr. Ferne Price's name in the Hall of Fame.  Apparently she, in her youth, played on a winning softball team that earned a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.  It is in the Women's Division on the second floor.  We shall find it!  The countryside is very much like yesterday; beautiful and full of color.  I am riding in the back seat so that I can work on this journal.  Kim is driving and Maya is navigating.  My, what experiences we are sure to have!

•   mileage - 73??? - 3:00 PM - Cooperstown - Hall of Fame

God damn New Yorkers!  We must have payed $4 in tolls alone in just two hours!  What do they do with that money?  Signs around the construction sites say, "Helping to rebuild New York!" but I've yet to see anybody working toward that goal.

Cooperstown is a quaint town, much like Salem, Indiana.  The population is 2,300 and its biggest draw is naturally the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Before we set out on our mission to the Hall of Fame we drove through Cooperstown and tried to find a hotel room without any luck.  The town of Cooperstown is certainly raking in the dough.  I wonder why a Holiday Inn hasn't taken advantage of this booming tourism, but perhaps zoning laws don't permit it.  We have decided to find lodging in Schenectady or Albany as Cooperstown is beyond our budget.  We won't have long in the Hall of Fame as we want to find a room before dark.

• 8:30 PM - Albany - Quality Inn - $74.80

I'm not sure, but I think we have just learned some major lesson on our travels - that of making reservations before we reach our destination.  But first things first...  We paid the admission into the Baseball Hall of Fame and listened to the guide at the entrance babble about floors and ballplayers; however, being on a tight schedule, and not too concerned with most of his drivel, I asked him, "How do we get to the Women's Division on the second floor?"  He looked at us like we were these three liberated, male chauvinist women before giving us directions.  When we reached the Women's Division we saw why he had given us that condescending smile. 

The Women's Division consists of one lousy little glass plated exhibit.  There are pictures of women teams in the 1920's and a few articles talking about these women and what baseball, or softball as they call it, meant in regards to women.  While Maya and I stood before the exhibit staring into the glass searching for Ferne, Kim wandered around the second floor in searching for more information on women to no avail.  Returning to the lone exhibit, she immediately located "Price, Laferne" on a big board of names inside the glass.

We took pictures of everyone pointing at the exhibit and Laferne's name (which we did not know was Laferne).  The picture we took of her name probably won't come out because the flash bounces off of glass.  Oh, well, we did our best.  I purchased a Hall of Fame pin and a pack of greeting cards as souvenirs for Laferne.  Our mission had been completed.

We toured the rest of the Hall of Fame at a quick, yet informing, pace and left after an hour.  I took pictures of Maya and Kim outside the Hall.  A woman in a car asked if I'd like to be in the picture, but I had visions of her taking off with my camera and the pictures of Laferne, and so I ignored her.   

After the H of F we traveled to Schenectady to find a room.  Maya, who hadn't eaten anything all day and who voiced this fact aloud quite often, had found our bag of food and was in junk food heaven.  Kim was still driving, and I was now the navigator.  In Schenectady, after paying another fortune in tolls, we found that all the inns were full and not even a stable was available for us to sleep in.  We traveled on to Albany where a cheap hotel was located.  It was full. As darkness was descending and tempers heating up, we bit the bullet and paid a fortune at the Quality Inn, the only hotel available. 

Dinner was finally eaten at Burger King and we settled down to enjoy our money's worth of the hotel.  I took a 45 minute shower.  Kim enjoyed a hot bath.  We all watched Planes, Trains, and Automobiles on our free Showtime Channel.  Needless to say, all this was not worth $75.  Yep, our first lesson was a costly one.