It used to be that when you were looking for a place to stay at the beach for a couple of nights, you asked friends for recommendations, you made a couple of calls and then you booked a room somewhere and that was that.

Now you can sit at a computer and open window after window, see pictures of all the aspects of a resort or hotel they want you to see, get more information than you probably need, read disgruntled customer reviews, wade through it all to try and figure out if the positive reviews were done by the staff of the hotel…and just, in general, go crazy from the options in front of you.

That’s the way it goes these days.

You either swoop down on something with a complete lack of information and planning…or you have so much information that you don’t really know how to process any of it.

I remember driving down to Myrtle Beach around the 4th of July with no reservations anywhere,two adults and two kids in our ancient Plymouth Valiant, no air conditioning in the ancient Plymouth Valiant….blissfully unaware that you really had to have a room when you drove to the beach.

Did I mention we were driving our ancient Plymouth Valiant?

I think I thought we’d just drive down and it would be easy to find a room anywhere along the beach.

It doesn’t work like that.

It’s funny how sitting in front of a computer screen can approach those same feelings of frantic helplessness….finding places that look good only to get to the next screen and find that it’s unavailable, finding places that are “too ‘spensive” or finding places that are too corporate or too far from the beach, or finding places that are cheap but really pretty scary looking when you look closely at the pictures the motel provided.

And after a couple of hours of “how about this one?”, I think you’re broken down enough to just pick whatever’s available.

It really is the same feelings of helplessness that we experienced on the trip in the Valiant.  You’re clicking icons with a mouse, staring at pictures and reading descriptions…but it’s not so different from running into lobby after lobby, checking to see if maybe this motel was going to save us from my naive lack of planning.

We picked a place finally.  It’s on the beach. It has a pool.

How hard could it be when those are the only real considerations?