Good Morning Everyone!
I’m currently sitting at my hotel desk, looking out the window at a beautiful lake. This may come as a bit of a surprise to you all since you’re under the impression that my view should be of the city that never sleeps. Needless to say the view is very different and the trip I took instead is pretty much the counter opposite of the trip I was supposed to be on. However, like everything else in the world, things come up.
So I was originally supposed to be in NYC this weekend to celebrate birthdays and go to the Royal Caribbean Blog Meet Up. I have had my heart set on it for a good couple months now. I was planning on driving down with friends who ended up having to back out due to a family emergency. I decided to look into staying in Jersey for free with my Hilton Honors points but the choices that were available in my range didn’t really appeal to me. As I started looking into that, Rochester was hit with a terrible windstorm with 70-80 mph winds that devastated the area. Parts of the suburbs were in an official state of emergency. So for over a week my hotel that I work at has been just about sold out and one of my top accounts has tons of utility workers that stayed with me. We were then also hit with Winter Storm Stella dumping over 2 feet of snow in less than 2 days. Needless to say, we are now awaiting locusts!
With everything going on at work and knowing financially I also have to be in Dallas this week, I had to cross off NYC. I felt absolutely awful doing it. I was looking forward to meeting everyone, getting to see my sister in law who lives down there and exploring more of the city. Even though I work in sales at the hotel which is typically a Monday-Friday schedule, I do go in occasionally on weekends. In this storm scenario, I was pulling close to double my normal hours between being on the phone with my client all hours of the night and day whenever I’d have an extra room free up to helping my team, we were all pretty exhausted. There were so many people that were displaced without heat and power as well as all the workers from out of state and Canada that needed to be housed trying to return power to everyone. People tend to forget that being in the hotel business is a 24/7 job.
I still wanted to go somewhere for Jeff’s Birthday but I knew I had to keep it close by in case something came up at work. In Western NY there are a set of long, skinny lakes that look like fingers. That reason is why they are called the Finger Lakes. There is a beautiful new Hampton Inn in Penn Yan at the tip of Keuka Lake that had Hilton Honors rooms for 19,000 points. We had more than enough for 2 nights so we decided to book it since it is only a hour away. These lakes are very well known for wineries around the lake. The soil around these lakes produce very good grapes for riesling wines especially. We have done a good chunk of the wine trail around the neighboring lake called Seneca (I’ll link my post from that below) so we decided to give Keuka a try.
I will hopefully have the Keuka post done for Wednesday. Please keep in mind that Wednesday will be my travel day for Dallas so I will be in route. Just remember that sometimes things happen for a reason. I ended up having a lovely weekend and can’t wait to tell you all about it. Always keep an open mind and heart!
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