The Night I Slept in a Hotel Lobby Kelly Maida   © Copyright 2020 by Kelly Maida

I will never forget the night I had traveled to New York city with my daughter Kaleigh. She was 20 years old at the time. And I was chosen to be a contestant on a new Television show called the best game show ever. I was nervous going to the city because of all of the traffic. I live in upstate New York but its practically farm land where I am from compared to the city. I booked us tickets for a bus and I did not reserve a hotel because I was told that I would only be there three hours tops so that would give me plenty of time. I also did not plan it out very well of where my daughter would stay while i was on set. The Casting agency said that we could bring someone and they could stay in the lobby. However I got very lucky when they said my daughter could sit in the audience with me. That made me very happy, plus I was able to share the experience with her. It actually turned out to be a lot of fun. It was the first episode that we were in and Reese Witherspoon was a guest. The host of this show was Neil Patrick Harris. He was a lot of fun, he shook my hand as well as others while he came down the aisle to start the show. My daughter and I had a blast. I was one of I think 20 possible contestants. They chose one person, I was not chosen but I still had a great time. When they were wrapping things up at the end of the Television show they said it was taken a little longer than they thought. They had us wait while people were leaving. When we were finally told we could leave my daughter and I rushed outside. We bumped into Perez Hilton the blogger. He was really sweet and my daughter and I took a couple of photos with him. We then looked at the time and rushed to walk over to the bus station. We were shocked when we arrived at the bus station to find out not only did it leave because we were an hour late that no other buses were leaving until the morning. We were at least 5 hours from where we lived and were not sure what to do. I brought us to the train station but we ran into the same problem no other trains were leaving until the morning.

So I looked at my daughter and said well it looks like we will have to spend the night. We started walking to hotels and found that they were all packed. I asked the front desk clerk at one of the hotels why are all the hotels so full? He looked at me and said that the Pope was in town. Wow I really picked a great day to be stuck in New York. The front desk clerk looked at me and said look this is a comfortable lobby and it is safer than you staying on the streets so you and your daughter can stay in the lobby on the couch over there. I was so happy for his hospitality, I was almost in tears at this point and this man just really made me feel better. So my daughter and I went over to the couch in the middle of a hotel lobby. We felt awkward but quite honestly we were so exhausted from all of the traveling and walking that we did all day we were actually happy to finally sit down. As time went on the lobby was fairly quiet so we started to feel more settled on the couch. Then all of a sudden just as I was falling asleep a drunk guy comes over and sits next to me. I looked at him and said excuse me but you need to move your sitting to close to me. One of the workers came over and asked if everything was okay because they could see that I was very stressed out. The drunk guy looked at the worker and told him I was his sister. I yelled I am absolutely not this man’s sister. I looked at the worker and said I have never seen this man before in my life and he is being rude. The front desk man came over and asked drunk man to leave me and go to his room. Thank god I was really getting nervous. All the arguing woke up my daughter and scared her as well. So the man finally leaves and my daughter and I tried to get comfortable again. Then ten minutes later drunk guy comes back down the elevator and starts yelling at us to come with him. I yelled to the front desk man to please get this man out of here. The front desk man had to send the drunk man off back to his room. Wow what a night. Well at that point my daughter and I had enough. We got up it was at this point about 5 am. We decided to get some breakfast and head over to the train early to get our tickets. Once we had some breakfast we started to feel better. We made our way to the train station. We will still nervous because there was no guarantee that we would be able to get a ticket. However the train’s schedule was much earlier than the bus and we did not want to wait all day. We arrived to the train station and were very lucky to receive tickets back to Utica. Not only did we get tickets, our tickets we only had to wait a couple of hours. I am happy to say that we made it back home safely and had no more encounters with anyone else. After that day I tried to arrange better travel arrangements for my acting adventures.