The Inn of a Thousand Days

The Inn of a Thousand Days: A Memoir of a Country B&B Broken bones. Quixotic chefs and Dickensian tenants who reside like ghosts in guest rooms laid waste by time and neglect. This memoir is Alan Tongret's off-beat and bittersweet tale of leaving a New York acting career to help his parents wrest a hulking hotel from the graveyard and transform it into the cozy Lamplighter Inn at the rough-hewn paradise of Augusta, Kentucky. Tongret jumped into the task with brio, thinking he'd have the inn open in ten months and would then luxuriate in the country lifestyle while sipping mint juleps in the lobby with his guests betweeen writing plays and novels. But he and his parents were sucked into a four-year quagmire as they wrestled with endless seams of rotted wood, shiftless helpers and mushrooming debt, Alice-in-Wonderland building codes and marital stress. When they were about to sink below the horizon for good Tongret risked the last of his family's resources to create a theatre piece that saved the hotel and what remained of their sanity. It's an altogether improbable yet totally true miracle of energy, vision, and iron-clad tenacity. THe snugly paced, novelistic plot and poetic imagery form a cuationary tale of so many American towns that are embattled by decay and the Wal-Mart blitzbrieg. "I have read Alan Tongret's memori with absolute fascination; it is surely one of the most harrowing accounts of obsession since Moby Dick. In this case the Great White Whale was a hotel. ... Tongret's account is more than merely a suspenseful story; it carries implied questions of character and commitment, and how they may be most wisely fulfilled."--From the Foreword by Dale Wasserman