Whew. I would have posted sooner but I was helping a friend. We were strategizing ways for bilingual entrepreneurs to use social networking to fend off zombie attacks. Inversely, during this process we developed and launched Fleshbook, a way for zombies around the world to stay connected, share photos and videos of recent flesh-eating orgies, and check in at places like malls, basements and grocery stores where the few remaining live humans are hiding out.
We're also engaged in a bidding war with two very large cellular providers over rights to the exclusive launch of an app for smart phones, called Flesh Mob. The app will tie in with Google Earth to provide zombies with GPS coordinates for said live humans, based on signals that emanate from their cell phones when they try to call one another for help. Nearby zombies can then assemble spontaneously and surprise the humans with dance and/or song. It's exhausting work, but we're really proud of the results thus far.
Where was I? Travel, desert, childhood reminiscences, music, zombies - oh, right. Motels.
By motels, I mean those small, family-owned-and-operated places that were called 'motor inns', 'motor courts' or 'motor hotels' back in the very old days. ('motor' + 'hotel' = 'motel'. genius.) Motels usually consist of a single long, low one-story building, or a series of tiny individual buildings. They often have no more than a dozen rooms, the doors of which all face the parking lot. You can pull your car right up to the door and walk in. There's nearly always an owner or manager that lives in the back behind the lobby and emerges, grumpy and disheveled, when you ring the bell for service as instructed by a sign on the front desk or affixed to the bulletproof window outside the lobby.
I seek these little places out as often as I can. When it's midnight, and I've been driving for sixteen hours, and I only need a place to sleep for a few hours before I shower and hit the road again, I have trouble justifying $100 or more for a 'good' hotel, a chain hotel. I'd rather spend $35 for the room and put the remaining $65 in the gas tank. Call me crazy.
One place I stayed that typifies the small motel experience had a light yellow brick facade and was located at the crossroads of two obscure two-lane highways near the middle of nowhere in Manitoba Province, Canada. The owner was obviously doubtful about my assertion that I was merely an adventurous young American girl out tooling around his part of the country with my German Shepherd as a companion. He seemed to think I was a draft dodger, fugitive from the law, drug runner, or - barring all that - had six other people tucked away out of sight around the corner, waiting until after I'd paid single occupancy rates to invade the room and stay for free.
This man told me in no uncertain terms that my dog was not allowed in the room. Amiably, I said it would be no trouble, my dog had a bed in the jeep and would be perfectly alright there for the night. This only seemed to make him more skeptical of me. To prove JUST how suspicious he was, the key he handed me was to the room right next to the motel office. The room where, I assumed, he put all the troublemakers so he could keep an eye on them. I shrugged, went outside, walked and fed my dog to get him settled in, then took my things to the room.
Which was immaculate. Tidy, clean, obviously well tended to. The bathroom, though. To call it a technicolor nightmare hardly begins to describe the full effect. The bad, bad, awful fluorescent lighting illuminated bright yellow linoleum floors. Mud-brown toilet. Grass-green towels. Pale blue bathtub. I laughed, thinking of the lengths this man had gone to to protect his hodgepodge of remnant-sale bathroom fixtures, then went back to the truck for my camera.
I made a special point that night of double-bolting the door and wedging a chair under the handle, just in case the looks I interpreted as 'skeptical' and 'suspicious' were actually intended as 'sizing me up for that crawl space out back underneath the shed'. Because of the movies. You know what I'm talking about. Any time a small motel appears in a movie, any combination of the following things are likely to happen:
1) someone stumbles across a dead body
2) someone gets stalked and killed by the crazy motel proprietor
3) two people with opposite personality types are forced to share a bed, at which point:
a) the come to realize the common bonds they both share
b) they fall in love
c) both
My real-life experiences in even the shabbiest motels have varied greatly, but not been quite that colorful. There was the motel outside of Milwaukee ($18/night!) with rooms so tiny the door didn't open all the way. The place in Colorado, where I set my card key down on the night table and had to pry it our of some sticky substance the next morning. The one in Kansas where I zipped myself into my sleeping bag to avoid contact with the bed linens.
Sure, I could stay only in the chain motels, where I know what I'm getting every time I walk in the door. I definitely would during the event of a zombie attack, because I could raid the vending machines and mini bars for food and fashion weapons from the grab bars in the bathrooms. The small motels, though, are all part of the adventure.
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