One side-effect of our four nights in Saratoga Springs: we learned how much we liked — <em>needed</em> — extended stays in general (as opposed to two- and three-night blow-in/blow-out visits). So we started looking for Airbnb sorts of places near Saratoga Springs, even if we couldn’t stay in Saratoga Springs…
Nothing really that close, of course, so we widened our search. Lo and behold, a very interesting-sounding Airbnb place: an older home in a suburb of Schenectady, called Scotia — for a very reasonable weekly price!
We immediately contacted the host.
And then waited… and waited…
Finally she got back to us, the next day. Alas, she said, she would be unable to host us — because something had come up with another reservation, and she’d had to scramble to take care of her current guests, and she’d had to move one of those parties into the house we wanted, sorry sorry so very sorry—
Well, by then, we’d invested a certain amount of time in researching things to do in and near both Scotia and Schenectady. And we had almost no time left to look for longer-term lodging anyway. So we just checked around for plain old hotels, found a Comfort Inn in Scotia, and booked it… for three nights. Not ideal, but honestly there wasn’t that much we wanted to see nearby. We just wanted at that point to regroup, and plan a real extended, put-our-feet-up interlude somewhere.
Which we did. Oh, we had a few highlights right there in Scotia(ish):
- A family member’s family had once lived — but no longer lived — in a favorite home in Schenectady, and although it wasn’t delivered as a <em”>request, exactly, I could tell they sorta-kinda wouldn’t mind if I maybe took a photo or two…?
- On the way to that address, I stopped at a mall to see if I could get my watch battery replaced. (It’d stopped the day before.) Of course the mall — like many — was on its last legs, but a jeweler there did replace the battery. Unfortunately, they also set the weekday-and-date display just slightly wrong: it was 12 hours off-schedule. So ever since, every time the watch’s time creeps towards noon, the day of the week and the date also start to roll forward. I haven’t taken the time (haha) to fix it yet. It’s very confusing, though, when The Missus asks me what day it is and I look down at my wrist and then must asked myself, “Wait — is it actually daytime outside, or is it night? And thus do I just tell her what my watch says, or do I need to subtract a day?”
After I left the mall, I headed into the heart of Schenectady. I had my new camera with me. It was raining quite a bit, off and on, but I figured I could at least take the pictures of the house from the curb, through an open car window. But as I headed that way, I kept glimpsing, in the sky, an enormous dark tower. A church…? But what the hell kind of church…?!? I realized I just had to photograph that, too. So I drove around, glancing skywards occasionally… and just as I arrived at the foot of it, promptly got lost in a maze of streets on which I couldn’t park at all. I didn’t get the photo — the one shown here was taken by the author of this fascinating blog post, titled “Schenectady’s Grotesque Grotesques.”.- While discussing the family member’s house project, she told me the location was very close to a residential section of Schenectady called the “GE Plot.” (You can read about the GE Plot on Wikipedia.) The Missus and I did drive around that neighborhood while we were up there… took no pictures, but the houses and properties were indeed impressive!
By the way, a shrewd observer will notice that Scotia itself doesn’t seem to have been a highlight. We’d meant to spend more time looking around there as well as Schenectady — just didn’t, as it happened, have the time to spend. Even the meals were cursory — two of the three were simple takeout or delivery at the hotel. The third was a surprise — a Japanese restaurant which probably rates among the top dozen meals we’ve had on the trip so far… But yeah, we just didn’t experience Scotia enough to do it, well, justice.