of these small hotels have rooms with baths; the table is plain;
but while automobiling one soon comes to prefer plain country
living.
In the larger cities it costs a fortune in tips before the machine
and oneself are well housed; to enter Albany, Boston, or New York
at night, find your hotel, find the automobile station, find your
luggage, and find yourself, is a bore.
No one who has ever ridden day after day in the country cares
anything about riding in cities; it is as artificial and
monotonous as riding a hunter over pavements. If one could just
approach a city at night, steal into it, enjoy its lights and
shadows, its confusion and strange sounds, all in passing, and
slip through without stopping long enough to feel the thrust of
the reality, it would be delightful. But the charm disappears, the
dream is brought to earth, the vision becomes tinsel when you draw
up in front of a big caravansary and a platoon of uniformed
porters, bell-boys, and pages swoop down upon everything you have,
including your pocket-book; then the Olympian clerk looks at you
doubtfully, puzzled for the first time in his life, does not know
whether you are a mill-hand from Pittsburgh who should be assigned
a hall bed-room in the annex, or a millionaire from Newport who
should be tendered the entire establishment on a silver platter.
The direct road from Rochester to Syracuse is by way of Pittsford,
Palmyra, Newark, Lyons, Clyde, Port Byron, and Camillus, but it is
neither so good nor so interesting as the old roads through Geneva
and Auburn.
In going from Buffalo to Albany _via_ Syracuse, Rochester is to
the north and some miles out of the way; unless one especially
desires to visit the city, it is better to leave it to one side.
Genesee Street out of Buffalo is Genesee Street into Syracuse and
Utica; it is the old highway between Buffalo and Albany, and may
be followed to-day from end to end.
Instead of turning to the northeast at Batavia and going through
Newkirk, Byron, Bergen, North Chili, and Gates to Rochester, keep
more directly east through Le Roy, Caledonia, Avon, and
Canandaigua to Geneva; the towns are old, the hotels, most of
them, good, the roads are generally gravel and the country
interesting; it is old New York. No one driving through the State
for pleasure would think of taking the direct road from Rochester
to Syracuse; the beautiful portions of this western end of the
Here's a piece of wisdom on driving or cute car quote to study:
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. ~Lewis Mumford
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