Matters of accommodation

In a crass attempt to build my Google rankings, as well as to provide a service for travelers who find themselves in Kingston, New York in the midst of a snowstorm on their way to Sloan Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, I offer a few tips:

The first is that the Roadway Inn here is a lot scarier looking than the Budget 19 Motor Inn, a fact that in itself scares me quite a bit.

The second gets into matters of marketing: If you are going to knock something off crudely, knock off something that people want. One of this fine city's motels, apparently in an attempt to dupe exceptionally inattentive or sub-literate fans of the Travelodge motel chain, has dubbed itself "Superlodge." Now perhaps there is a market for, say, a Y Hotel to snatch some business from the W. But a fake Travelodge? Oh my. 

The third tip relates to matters epicurean. The restaurant at my chosen house of lodging, the Quality Inn and Suites, features "Atlantis salmon." Delicious with beurre blank.

The fourth is that it is always a bad sign when a place of hospitality touts among its amenities a "TV remote control."

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You might ask yourself, as I repeatedly have, why am I driving six hours through mixed precipitation to get to Sloan when I have already purchased a non-refundable ticket to ride for 49 minutes in a leather seat on JetBlue Airways watching their 23 complimentary channels of DirecTV. 

The answer is simple: I have been banned from flying. 

Dr. BT alluded to this earlier and I blew it off, but I happened to have an appointment to see my pulmonologist today. Over the course of two hours and a chest X-ray, she moved from being "wary" of me on an airplane to "antsy" then "concerned" and finally opposed. Airplane cabins are pressurized to the equivalent of 8,000 feet or so. That and the shifting air pressure during altitude changes might cause the last tenuous threads of pleura holding my lungs up to snap, collapsing my poor little lung into a heap like a cheap raincoat dropped to the floor of a... Superlodge. 

As I've often been reminded, the human lungs are magnificently redundant -- you can get by, sort of, with a third or possibly even 20 percent of their potential capacity -- but since both my lungs are partially collapsed, I can't tempt fate. Welcome to Kingston.