We soon learned to keep away from the cities at night.  It is so much more delightful to stop in smaller towns and villages; your host is glad to see you; you are quite the guest of honor, perhaps the only guest; there is a place in the adjoining stable for the machine; the men are interested, and only too glad to care for it and help in the morning; the best the house affords is offered; as a rule the rooms are quite good, the beds clean, and nowadays many 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 State are to the south, in the Genesee and Wyoming Valleys, and through the lake region.