Hotels and motels

What adventures the itineration life has to offer. We travel a lot for our fund raising work and usually the churches we visit arrange for us to have somewhere to pay. We are so grateful not to have to pay for accomodations each weekend. This helps our cash build up more quickly for our work.

Most of the time we are at a standard motel. A brand name place along the highway - nearly always these are clean and unremarkable. We did get put up in a higher end chain that had nice sheets and a jaccuzi tub. Memorable.

In small towns there are often not chains just local mom and pop motels. Often they compete for the little churches' patronage and the church will ask if it's okay. This is awkward since you don't really know what the competition is and you don't want to be ungrateful for a free room.

A whole series of towns have motels that cater to hunters to stay in business. So we've stayed in several that had hunting motifs and one mobile home converted to hunters quarters. Some places even have notes about, Please don't use the towels for cleaning off mud, or Don't clean animals in the room.It's a world I would never have known.

Recently we stayed at a hunting lodge/b and b, that had started it's life as a nursing home. This was the best place in town according to our hosts and I believed them. It was still looking like a nursing home in the halls, but the room was clean, comfy and practical. It made for good of joking around between Kerry and I and it was an experience I wouldn't trade. Elk heads, deer antlers, biscuits and gravy, shower and hall railings, and all.

We stayed in a place we referred to as the "Killer" motel. It wasn't that anything was bad necessarily. It was a small town motel and run down a little on the outside, a little dark. Some of the cars lurking in the parking lot seemed somehow sinister. The inside was okay, a little well used, but not gross. Maybe it looked like something we'd seen in a creepy movie. Or maybe it was creepy guy at the check-in.

I chose for myself a Super 8 in Florida near family. The new coat of paint on closer inspection covered very little of the age of the place. They weren't friendly and the long hairs in the sheets might have been from the maid, but I tried the other bed anyway. What do I expect - I chose the cheapest place.

On our own vacation, we stayed at a 100+year old hotel in an former mining town. We were downstairs in a shop/lobby when the local Ghost tour went through and up the stairs to where the rooms were. Some woman 90 years ago threw acid on another woman and thus the ghostly story came to be.  The building had settled unevenly and our doors had quite an angle on them as did the floor, but no ghosts showed. The ghost hunters were looking for among other things "cold spots" which they think indicate the presence of ghosts. Our air conditioner wasn't working and I told Kerry, if I found a cold spot I was going to roll around on it so I could cool down. He thought maybe if it was a ghost, the ghost would be grossed out by the sweaty girl rolling around and leave.