My drive to Dayton from Manitowoc (between Milwaukee and Green Bay) was greatly smooth good roads with long periods of Road Construction.
The saying in the upper-Midwest is there are two real seasons “Winter & Road Construction!” That seemed to be very much the case!
Slow construction traffic added 15% to the travel time of accomplished in 2007. Did notice that despite being mostly ripped up, the Tri-State Tollway still had their tolls. Imagine if you went into your favorite restaurant to learn that due to Kitchen Construction they could only serve Cold Cuts rather than your usual Steak. Might you raise an eyebrow when the bill comes for a couple porterhouse steaks? That is the logic the tollway uses – give you two lanes at 45 mph, dirt & dust clouds as a freebie, and charge for the high speed clear way they promise to provide.
After last year’s bedbug palace we switched hotels to the Holiday Inn Express South. Located in a very industrial area the Hotel was a decent Traveler’s Style Hotel. Unfortunately the promised In-Room High Speed Wireless failed hours into our stay, and despite the front desk’s lack of knowledge of any problem, the Hotel Internet Problems had been reported and had multiple open service tickets with the provider. Hundreds of guests were shortchanged for the period of the show because the support company wouldn’t send out a tech to reboot the local servers.
Our vehicle was left along, which was somewhat a surprise given the broken hulks of dead limos and other “post raid remainders” of vehicles in the parking lot.
“Hara the sleeze” and “Salem the abandoned” has been covered in my Dayton Hamvention 2008 Follow-Up Report No. 21 – Dayton the Unwashed as the state of affairs of the Hara and the Salem remote parking have continued to decline.
73
Steve
K9ZW
With Varying Frequency - Amateur Radio Ponderings 
We booked Miamisburg at the last minute, near Dayton mall. It was worth the 20 minute drive to Hara. In 2006, I drove in without reservations, and walked in to an empty place in Fairborn.
No bedbugs detected either time, but that is subject to rapid change.
Miamisburg is nice. Fairborn/Beavercreek is nice too. (Relative to the industrial areas.)
The ‘luv shack’ I used in Fairborn in 2006 was near Wright-Pat., but besides a couple of Air Force kids shacked up with college girls for the weekend, it was empty(and cheap). Kinda close to the seedy part of Fairborn, but nothing compared to places I actually once had to permanently live in New Orleans. Everything is relative…
FWIW.
73 de w4kaz
Have done the travel & take what you could find myself, though not at Dayton.
I’ve done the two weeks sleeping under a 5-Ton Truck or in the corner of a barn. Done the Youth Hostels and back of the van bit too.
These days as I try to do some “work” work in the evenings or before the day starts, I prefer not to do too rough of a hotel, and greatly prefer to have my arrangements worked out ahead of time.
Keeps my away time down, as otherwise I would need to allow time to do the hunt & book, if I stayed too far out likely would have missed some of the activities, and wouldn’t know if I would be able to work from the hotel.
Seriously thinking of renting a cabin from a group I found a 1/2 hour outside of Dayton if I do Hamvention 2009.
As for the construction, it was major road works in Milwaukee, all around (or through if you went that way) at Chicago, at Indy and of course at Dayton. Simply sucked.
73
Steve
K9ZW
In hindsight, I’d need to admit that the drive is one of the better parts of the trip. Coming in from the southeast(NC-VA-WV-OH), we hit almost zero construction, and the only traffic was here at the local end.
We got to Hara from the hotel via a super secret extra-special and obviously completely unknown even-to-locals route, which was quite nice.
The location was not convenient for the stuff at the Crown Plaza, but I didn’t bother with that. It was an easy ride over to the FDIM vendor night. If time permits, it would be nice to add that one year.