Check availability

I turned on the air conditioner today. Normally that would be unremarkable for Detroit in June. But in the 24 days after I returned from Austin I haven't used it (though it got rather close yesterday). And I only had to use the furnace over one night. My utility bills are going to look quite nice. The weather has been in the mid to upper 70s F for the last week and I've been able to use a fan to cool the house down overnight.



I'm starting to fill in the details for my trip to Washington, DC at Labor Day for another Reconciling Ministries Convo. I have a guidebook from AAA. It shows a hotel in a reasonable location and at a reasonable price with their 3-diamond rating. Their detail blurb lists a phone number, but no website (hey, guys, could you join the modern age?). So I went to Orbitz. They lists lots of hotels for Washington, but not this one. If they allow you to search for a particular hotel, the method isn't obvious. I went to the AAA website. Same thing. So I used Google. The hotel's site was, of course, at the top of the results list. I entered dates in the box for "Check Availability." It thought for a while and gave me a page at the national chain reservation site and asked for city and dates so I could check availability. Didn't I just do that? But I complied. It returned what it found -- three hotels in the area, none were the one whose page I had just been at, and all 2-3 times more expensive. Yeesh!