A Tale of Two Cities

New York, where I come from, is a place you can catch a minyan as early or late as you want. Cleveland apparently is not such a place. The LATE maariv minyan is 9:50 PM and after multiple phone calls as well as a few emails, my husband managed to find out that Telz Yeshiva (properly spelled as Telshe for those who care) offers the only 10 PM maariv around. And so, driving across state lines from New York to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Ohio this is what we were aiming for. Surprisingly or not, we hit traffic and had quite a few delays ruining all chances for making minyan in Cleveland. GPS tells us Baltimore is only 58 miles out of the way (2 1/2 hours out of the way round trip). The enrollment office at Penn State claims they do have a Hillel house but the office was closed for the day so we couldn't find if there exists a minyan there... and the phone calls continued... To cut a long story short (not one of my talents, by the way) we were advised to go to Telz just in case, maybe, perhaps, by some weird stroke of accident, somehow, some bachurim didn't daven yet and would be available to form a minyan. So, we pull in to Telz about 11:16 PM Thursday evening, and my husband goes on in, asking the first bachur he sees what the possiblity is of making a minyan for maariv. By now you've guessed it folks, he tells my husband to go down the hall because the 11:15 Maariv is just getting started!!! Close to 70 yeshiva guys, davening at 11:15 PM as if schedueled to do so by Eliyahu Hanavi himself. Gotta love it!