"Planes, Trains & Automobiles" was the title of the 1987 holiday-season buddy film starring Steve Martin and John Candy.
And if you added in kids, dogs, houses, lofts, garden apartments, hotels and a few questionable decisions along the way, you'd have a pretty good take on a three-week Eastern Seaboard journey that nearly ended in a steaming and quite humid heap on a recent Thursday night in the Big Apple.
Some would say I had it coming.
My wife and I appreciate hotels as much as the next person, but we also have two young kids and an odd habit of taking our dog, an 11-year-old American Eskimo, along for the ride.
So with the combination of larger space requirements, fear of Led Zeppelin-style hotel-room destruction from our 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter and the need for canine-friendly digs, we've often gone off the hotel-reservation grid in favor of less formal arrangements.
In this case, that meant starting the trip with a home exchange for our first two weeks away. The locale was Kittery, Maine, just across the bridge from Portsmouth, N.H., and about a 75-minute drive from Boston.
Sure, there were minor hiccups. We got sweet-talked into watching the homeowner's 13-year-old (and nearly blind and possibly deaf) dog, Spencer, and my son picked up a connect-the-dots pattern of mosquito bites on his leg. But overall, that part of the trip worked out well, complete with postcard-picture beaches, greener-than-green countryside, unexpected meetings with New England-area friends, a fantastic local bakery and lots of "lobstah."
Emboldened, we headed south to New York for our final week, with plans for accommodations at a vacation-rental property in Manhattan. And while we've had pretty good luck with vacation rentals in the past, it goes without saying that each is a roll of the dice. Still, with visions of two enthusiastic kids exploring all of the museums, parks, high-rises, subways and everything else New York has to offer, we were feeling lucky.
Either way, the prospect of reserving (in this case, nontraditional New York) digs without a travel agent in my back pocket to ensure sufficient accommodations, verify legitimacy and provide a backup plan proved to be a mighty large -- and some would say insane -- bet.
And in this case, we crapped out.
Our first rental was a two-story-high loft in the Bowery district, complete with stunning brick walls, a great collection of art books and easy access to the parks, ethnic restaurants, subways, stores and neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, SoHo and the Village.
Of course, it was August and the owner failed to mention that the place also had no working air conditioning, meaning that the nearest cross-ventilation was in New Jersey and the upstairs bedroom was a hodgepodge of dusty fans where fresh air went to die. Miraculously, the thermostat monitoring the nonworking A/C finally edged below the 90-degree mark at about 2 a.m. during the first -- and last -- night of our stay. Good thing we were all awake to witness the event. And I didn't need those five pounds anyway.
Our attempt to improve the situation after our night in the sweatbox resulted in what we thought was an ideal solution: a legitimate one-bedroom garden apartment in TriBeCa that slept four and accepted pets. The place, located in a historically protected collection of townhomes, was very comfortable, stylishly decorated and just steps away from the walkways along the Hudson River. It also had air conditioning.
And that was just fantastic until the owner, who lived upstairs, texted us about 15 minutes after we checked in saying he "changed his mind" about having a family of four in the apartment, and that we needed to leave immediately unless we were willing to pay an additional $100 a night and a $1,000 deposit.
All of which left an idiot father temporarily short a pretty good chunk of change (the fine gentleman also took his sweeeeeet time processing our refund) with wife, two kids, bags and dog in tow hailing a cab in lower Manhattan while scrambling on his iPhone for pet-friendly accommodations in the most expensive and most hotel-occupied U.S. city.
As Ray Charles famously put it: "I'm busted."
Of course, New York is where athletes ranging from Joe Namath to Willis Reed to Derek Jeter made their bones largely by performing in the clutch, and in our case, the city came up with some late-game heroics for our trip.
In hindsight, we found out that about a third of the 300-odd Manhattan hotels listed on Expedia are pet-friendly, and some are of the posh variety, including the Waldorf-Astoria, Jumeirah Essex House and Trump SoHo New York.
But at the time, we only knew from past experience that Starwood had a good track record for getting its hotels to allow pets, and indeed the company came up big. We found accommodations at the two-year-old Sheraton TriBeCa, which was cool and sleek, and complete with an attentive staff.
And when that hotel booked up after a couple of nights, we moved uptown to the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers near Times Square, whose recent $160 million renovation included design upgrades and room enlargements, and whose midtown location was pretty ideal as a jumping-off point for our daily adventures.
Most important, both hotels were equally accommodating for two- and four-legged creatures, enabling me to breathe easier and the kids to fully enjoy the human amusement park that is New York.
So does this mean that we've abandoned going off the hotel grid forever? Not necessarily. According to a 2010 survey commissioned by HomeAway, U.S. and European vacation rentals were generating more than $85 billion a year, and for good reason: They can be price-competitive, charming, spacious and can give visitors a glimpse into how locals live.
That said, if the margin for error is a thin one and backup plans are limited, I'll probably play it a little safer and stick with the hotels. After all, one more trip like this one, and all that'll be left is an aggravated wife, sad kids, a mournful dog and a tombstone that reads:
"Herein lies the hotel industry editor who wouldn't stay in a hotel."
Contact Danny King at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @dktravelweekly.