One of my goals for our trip this past month was to stay in as many small motels as possible. Greg will tell you that there’s nothing that makes me happier than a swimming pool in the middle of a parking lot. But when I set out to find these places to stay, I was disappointed in how many have disappeared, especially in recent years.
I don’t need lots of frills, usually just a clean, quiet place to sleep. The swimming pool is a huge bonus. And I don’t mind making a phone call to secure a reservation.
As I began my search, at first I would find places that were viable. Then I’d find out they were closed. Many had fallen into such disrepair they were torn down, a few as recently as the past year. I already had seen these changes in the Canadian side of Niagara Falls when we visited nine years ago. Those little mom and pop motels we stayed at as a family- my dad driving up the road deciding which one we’d stay at– are long gone. Greg and I did find one on that trip (the Blue Moon) where we stayed– and is still in business today.
These little motels have been swallowed up by box chains that now cast a shadow over the Big Texan in Amarillo. When we stopped in Gallup several months ago at the Desert Skies to take photos with the sign, we learned the motel has closed. And is being torn down. The owner was there and said he would be building a new one. A chain.
If you’ve read my book, Route 66 Dreams, you know that part of the story is about staying in little motels, about a father’s goal to take his family on a trip via Route 66 as he remembered it. That trip was in 1986, 20-some years after his prior trip, and there had already been major changes. On the last night of the vacation, he relents and makes a reservation for a chain hotel to give his wife the same soap and room she might find in another motel, the conformity that many people crave on the road instead of the uniqueness a mom and pop motel provides.
While I might not always like the aesthetic changes of some of the boutique motels, repurposed from the old motels, but I’m grateful someone has tried to take a property and give it new life. I know that things have to change. And yet I remain sad that we continue to let so much disappear, as if those stories don’t matter.