My mother and I were driving from Massachusetts to Ohio with plans to find a hotel halfway through the trip. Once I started calling around, though, around 2:00 AM, every hotel from Rochester on was booked solid. I called thirty to forty places before calling the Buffalo Tourist Lodge (which I found on my phone's Google Maps app) and was thrilled that they had a vacancy. Well... I can sure see why.

Right off the bat we were nervous about the seedy-looking building. It was after 5:00 AM and we were desperate to sleep, so we went in anyway. The guy behind the counter said the rooms were $78 a night, and when we asked about a AAA discount, he said, "That's the already discounted price." Oh, but his credit card machine was 'broken', so he needed us to pay cash. Exhausted, we paid and took all of our luggage inside, worrying that our car would be broken in to.

The room... The carpet was once pink, but completely covered in black stains. The television in the room was decades old, and didn't work. The bathroom door didn't close properly, there was a centipede in the dirty bathtub, and the pillows were stained (in one pillowcase were two old pillows tied together).

We were afraid to sleep on the sheets, so we lay down on top of the bedspreads (which, come to think of it, probably had never seen a washing machine). I was awake worrying about bedbugs for longer than I was asleep, and both me and my mother (unknown to each other) planned what we would do if someone broke into our room.

I will never, ever, be going back there again, and if every other hotel room in the country is booked I will sleep in my car before checking in to that "hotel". On Yahoo! Travel, the Buffalo Tourist Lodge has 3 1/2 stars, and I am POSITIVE that someone is being paid to write positive reviews about this place, because no one in their right mind would recommend this hole-in-the-wall.

PROS: Nobody broke into our car (but that could just be because it was dawn by the time we checked in).