I don’t know how it started, but I still have this dream that a rundown motel (must have a swimming pool in the parking lot or I’m not interested!) will land in my lap and I’ll renovate it and turn it into something like the Chelliday Motel.
It’s not that I have this vision of actually running the motel myself– I haven’t found a way to multiple the time available to me in my life- but to head up a project like that has always intrigued me. I know I saw this as far back as high school, a dream that sat in the back of my mind. And now as I watch so many of these motels disappear, I find my dream disappearing, too.
I’m grateful for the people who take old motels and turn them into boutique motels, but often these have too much “new” in them. There are things that need to be changed and updated, yet the soul of the motel could still exist in a newer form. That doesn’t always happen in the boutique motels we see today. The vision is too far out from where the motel started.
I think back in high school the dream was more about building my own chain, even as these motels were turning into express boxes with interior entrances and table-top sized swimming pools. When Kemmons Wilson created Holiday Inn, it was about giving people a similar experience each night. And yet in that sameness, there was still a swimming pool, ash trays and glasses with the Holiday Inn great sign printed on them. And stationery. Many of these things disappeared in the name of giving people less, telling them it was too expensive to have these things if they wanted to pay less.
And yet without all these details, the motels lost their soul. And few could hang on until interested people could come along and revive them.
For now, the dream continues to be just that. Maybe something will happen one day, a turn of events. But for now, I’ll keep telling the stories of those in my mind, of those whose footprints I walk, dreaming of another time.