Accomodations on Long Island

There is a dearth of hotels/motels on Long Island. Out here in Southern California there seems to be one around every corner. Not so there. There are nice hotels on the Island -- but they're all 25 to 50 miles from where we want to be (Huntington.) Because we went to Montauk for a night, we stayed in two different ones.

Hotel Huntington (not its real name) is Indian run and given their laisse faire attitude about Brahma cattle wandering city streets, we shouldn't have been surprised to find: only one hangar in the closet; that the plate in the shower that indicates hot and cold was dangling sidewise. That they ran out of bagels, cereal every morning by 6:30 a.m. It was a smoking room and the desk had to bring up an ashtray. The coffee pot plugged into a dead socket; we had to move it into the bathroom. The right hand bedside reading light didn't work.

The shower-spa bath is about 5 ft. from the bed! (The toilet and wash basin are in a separate room.) We had to put a hand towel on the bottom of the shower every morning or we would have gone sailing out onto the bed that we'd just gotten up from.

Hotel Montauk (not its real name) is pretty much bare bones. Missing in action were: a hair dryer, Kleenex supply, a phone or any means of contacting the office several hundred yards away -- God help the person who falls and can't get up -- a coffee maker. There is no guest use computer -- "Oh, just turn your computer on! Every room has fi-os" which would have been dandy if I'd had my computer with me. There are no king-sized beds; only doubles. No smoking in the room, but there was a front porch with chairs right outside the door.

Speaking of smoking... I called "our favorite" hotel and was told, "Oh, there's no smoking at all on the property!" Stunned, I said, "Not even in the parking lot? On the beach?"

"Oh, no, (smugly) we signed on with the New York state Clean Air Act (and you may be very sure money was involved) and now our entire property is smoke free!"

At that exact second, my cell phone made a rude noise and disconnected. How did it know? Damn that thing is understanding!

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