I was going back to Evanston. It had been thirteen years. And now that I was 18, I thought I could manage the trip from San Francisco to Chicago on my own. To be fair, my main reason for going was Evanston. But if I was already going to be there, I also wanted to fit in as many university visits as I could over the next couple of days. So I booked a hotel in Evanston. Everything seemed fine. I had received all the confirmation emails through the booking platform, and I didn’t think there was anything else to check. Then, while I was waiting at the airport in San Francisco, my flight to Chicago was delayed. I called the hotel just to tell them that I would be arriving late and needed a late check-in. They told me my reservation had been cancelled. It was around 10:00 PM. My flight was leaving in about an hour. And I had just learned that when I landed in Chicago, I would have nowhere to stay. The hotel was a Holiday Inn franchise with a minimum check-in age of 21, something I hadn’t seen stated when I made the reservation. I started calling hotels in Evanston. Full. Another one. Full. Another one. Full. Eventually, I started calling hotels in downtown Chicago instead. I finally found one that confirmed they would let an 18-year-old check in. I had somewhere to sleep that night. But I still had nowhere to stay the following night. The three days in Evanston I had been imagining for thirteen years had suddenly turned into trying to find a hotel in downtown Chicago from an airport terminal in San Francisco.