Motel Hell

Spring inevitably brings Road Trip season. Road Trip season is that time of year when you no longer dread skating down the road through blizzard conditions and it finally becomes nice enough to hop in the car and actually enjoy driving.

Sunglasses at the ready, you mount up and see what new greenery spring has to offer.

When I was younger, a Road Trip was often a last minute proposition to go somewhere wild.

“Let’s go to the beach” was a fairly common comment made during my time in Houston.

Off we’d go at 3 in the morning just to do it.

We’d ride the ferry then crash on the beach or watch the sunrise then turn around and go home.

I even used to make the 21-hour ride to Houston from Saratoga in one go.

Not any more.

I still jump in the car occasionally just to “go somewhere”. For example, the Flaming Gorge loop is a nice day trip.

Nowadays I find a nice hotel stop a welcome respite on an extended journey.

Somewhere between the “let’s go now” phase and the “reputable hotel” era, I have found myself in several of what can only very graciously be termed “dive motels”.

What follows is a fairly accurate account of some of these “less-than-perfectly-planned” excursions.

Kidnapped by cockroaches

My best friend, Phil, and I one evening decided that since we both had three days off, we would go to San Antonio. Houston is only about a four-hour drive from San Antonio and since I had previously lived in San Antonio, I had a pretty good grasp of the many, cool things to see and do there.

Off we went.

We arrived in town sometime in the early morning hours and decided to get a motel and see the sights on the morrow. We were both young and flush with cash (pre-mortgage, pre-major bills), so this seemed a good idea. What we were sorely unaware of is that it was Cinco de Mayo and most of the reasonably-priced motels were booked.

Of course the posh hotels weren’t full. But even flush-with-cash twenty-somethings can’t afford Hilton rates.

So we drove hotel to hotel for hours before finding acceptable-seeming lodgings in what looked like a run-of-the-mill motor lodge.

… or so we thought.

Opening the door to our “suite” brought the not-to-be missed (ever again) smell of mold and three-day-old tacos.

The second thing we notice as we turn on the light in the everything-is-bolted-down room (including the possibly steam-powered black-and-white TV) is the single full-size bed.

We had gotten the impression that there were to be approximately somewhere in the neighborhood of twice that many.

Apparently this was lost in translation during negotiations to secure the room.

Since it was zero-exhausted-thirty, we gave in and pulled back the bed coverings.

I hesitate to call the “bedspread” or “sheets” anything but “coverings” … and that only in the strictest sense of the word.

Needless to say, we both slept in our clothes that night.

What we failed to notice when we turned on the lights upon entering the room was the faint scurrying of alarmed cockroaches.

We did not fail to notice the carapaced buggers almost everywhere when we woke up some few hours later to the sun streaming through the window though.

Aside from the very brief showers, we could not get out of that room quick enough.

We went on to walk the Riverwalk, see the Tower of Americas, visit the Alamo, see several cool missions, traipse through the sunken gardens in Zilker Park and even hit a strip club where we saw a girl whose silicone kept her pointing in wildly different directions.

Of all the things we did that day, Phil and I still seem to reminisce about that motel room more than any other facet of the trip.

NASCAR comes in first

I had been living in Wyoming for several years when Phil flew in to Colorado Springs to come visit. I went down and picked him up at the airport and we spent the week seeing the wonderment strewn about Wyoming’s Platte Valley.

When Friday came, we decided to head to Colorado Springs and get a room in preparation for his Saturday flight back to Houston.

We arrived about 10 p.m. and thought this would be plenty of time to get settled and get some rest.

Wrong.

Every motel below the “outrageously extravagant” range was booked solid because NASCAR was having a race in town that weekend.

Did I mention I am cheap? So is Phil. We both claim Scottish ancestry and celebrate the fact that Scots invented both the words “thrifty” and “frugal”.

Sometimes this view gets me into trouble.

Once again we spent hours combing the city in search of reasonable rooms. Much of that time was spent cussing NASCAR.

At around 3 a.m. we found a place with cottages for rent. The cottages were comparatively clean and at that time of the morning the guy running them was willing to cut a deal.

That turned out all right, but when you spend more time running around looking for a place to stay than you did driving to that town, you have wasted a considerable amount of time.

Horrible bowls us over

Phil had been living in Saratoga several years when we planned a trip to Las Vegas. This time we had our then-girlfriends, Barbara and Hazel, in tow.

We planned the October trip thoroughly. We had, in fact, planned all the whats, whens and wheres of all the things we would and might do.

We even had reservations at one of the nicer hotels.

We even planned on hitting some national parks on the way to Vegas. There are several really cool national parks you can make be “on your way” including Bryce Canyon, Moab, Zion, Arches, the Grand Canyon and the like.

We had planned to see the North Rim of the Grand Canyon that trip but the plan got derailed by a snowstorm in the middle of that route.

So the westward trip began by heading east to Cheyenne, then south through Colorado to New Mexico and then west through Arizona. This neatly skirted the aforementioned storm with the added bonus that we got to see the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

At about Flagstaff we got tired of driving through the horrendous windstorm that caught us off guard and decided to get some rooms.

Phil pulled up on a quaint-looking motel and we went in to check the prices.

Our first hint of trouble came from the check-in attendant herself. This woman looked like a long stretch of bad road and, speaking of stretch, looked from the scar across her neck like she had been hung at some point.

But we checked in anyway.

We opened the rooms just long enough to put our bags in them. During this brief time we noticed that, while on the dingy side, the rooms didn’t seem too bad.

Then we found a Chinese buffet down the road that was actually pretty good.

Getting back to the motel, we said our goodnights and adjourned to our rooms.

When my girlfriend and I got into our room, I sat down on the bed and immediately noticed the severe depression in the bed the covers had hidden.

Writing this, I am reminded of those funnel-like games you might find in the mall where you drop your pennies in and they spin in decreasing circles until they finally drop through a hole in the bottom.

I just really don’t want to think where the coins in the mattress’ version of that game might disappear to.

While I am discovering the disturbing vortex of doom in the mattress, my girlfriend has gone into the bathroom.

When she returns she is several shades paler and bids me “go look”.

Mold does not describe the things growing from the shower stall.

I shudder, but decide “screw it, we are only staying for a few hours and we already paid cash” and head towards the bed.

As an aside, paying cash up front at a motel is your second clue about the quality of a motel.

Much the same thing has gone on in Phil and Hazel’s room except their heater doesn’t work well and the door to their room looks like it might have starred in a Shrek movie with huge gaps between door and frame.

About 1:30 a.m., I am awakened to an insistent knock on the door.

I open the door far enough to be greeted by two (I’m guessing, but the clues are textbook) whores who want to know if I “want to party”.

I growl at them that “I’m trying to sleep here” and the scantily-clad pair shuffle to their next proposal.

I think to myself, “I don’t remember ordering ‘room service’”.

I return to bed none too happy and have to explain just what “that was all about”.

No sooner have I fallen asleep again … when the room begins shaking to a loud rumbling sound.

I jump out of the bed in full “What the Hell?” mode and look out the very small window in the back of the room.

I am not sure whether or not to say I was surprised to see a freight train going by not fifteen feet from the window.

The next morning I took a shower standing on a towel we brought (and left there) while trying not to touch anything but the soap.

The name of that motel was the Snow Bowl Motel.

The reason I remember that is because all the way to the Grand Canyon (where we had a blast), then all the way to Las Vegas (again, a good time and a nice hotel), and all the way home the women ground that name into our poor male brains as they vowed evil and horrible vengeance.

I have heard other people’s motel horror stories over the years and it seems like almost everyone has at least one, so be careful where you stay on your road trips this spring.

 

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