It’s getting a lot tougher to park your hog in the room, now, isn’t it? 
I’m not surprised to see so much mention of my backyard (San Luis Obispo / Morro Bay) in a thread about mid-century motels. We have a ton of them in these parts, and even the ones that haven’t been upgraded to boutique inns are in mostly good condition. Unless you book way ahead, don’t plan to stay in a motel here in May or June; it’s graduation season at Cal Polly and vacancy signs are few and far between. Summer availability isn’t too bad but our beach cities are notoriously overcast that time of year. When I come out of the water after surfing there are usually tourists out for a morning walk who ask, “When does the sun come out”. My answer is always, “October”.
That picture is just SO 1960s! The boxes surrounding the letters “MOTEL” even evoke the small tube TVs with poor reception you were bound to find in every room! 
Ha, I think it would’ve been acceptable at the place in Riggins! My current touring bike is hog-adjacent: Buell. More performance and way more comfortable for 2-up riding. I might be looking at something European next though 
I’m sure there are cockroaches in Tucumcari, but I haven’t seen any during my visits. Besides an overnight stay at The Blue Swallow (recommended), I’ve walked along the Route 66 hotel row and wandered around downtown. I’ve also explored a few of the ruins of old businesses outside of town…lots of grafitti, broken glass, old moldy furniture and general detritus, but no cockroaches. (Maybe it was because it was really hot and dry, not exactly prime weather conditions for them.)
Then we happened to stumble upon Cockroach Week.
It was definitely hot and dry when we passed through (summer), but that day there was a stampede of those big fat juicy cockroaches. They looked just like the ones that fly in Florida. Nasty.
I wonder how many cans for overnight?
If it is anything like the Rodeway Inns I mentioned above, I can guarantee it would never be enough. I’m pretty sure Rodeway Inn has by the hour pricing.
In the OP I mention that I recently went down the rabbit hole of looking at vintage motel postcards online. Well I also impulsively bought two vintage postcards from the Foothills Motel off of eBay, ant they arrived yesterday!
(That’s the motel I mentioned back in post #8, still in business, now updated into a boutique inn)
I like how the postcards show how the complex has changed over the years. The top one must be the oldest, since it just shows a large lawn in front of the motel. The bottom one shows a large Denny’s restaurant in front of the motel. Given how they appear connected, I guess the motel and Denny’s franchise were under the same ownership back then.
Today, the Denny’s building is long gone, and there’s a gas station at the bottom of the motel driveway. There’s just a parking lot and an empty lot where the Denny’s once was. If you go back to the older Google Street View imagery you can see when the former Denny’s building was still there; it looks to have been demolished some time between Aug. 2017 and Apr. 2018, and was vacant since before 2007.
I’m a huge fan of travel ephemera, especially postcards. On my last trip my collecting “theme” was hotel/motel cards. I picked up a couple dozen, I’ll post a slideshow here after I get them scanned.
Tim Hollis has a wonderful book with tons of great vintage hotel/motel cards from the golden age of Florida tourism: Wish You Were Here: Classic Florida Motel and Restaurant Advertising. His companion book, Selling the Sunshine State is also full of neat stuff from that era.
I was supposed (event was weather cxl’d) to be in a hotel tomorrow night; we’d arrive around midnight after the shoot ends & want to be on the road by 7, maybe 7:30 Sun morn because of timing of Sun afternoon’s event.
At a minimum, I’m bringing in a bag of clothes/toiletries, my camera bag, my drone, & her bag of clothes, along with any drinks / food we want in the room (fridge) overnight, maybe some of the other stuff in the car, too, depending upon how good/bad the neighborhood looks.
With 7 hrs in the room that’s probably about 6 hrs sleeping. The easy access of a drive-up motel is nice but why should I pay for an even nicer place when all I’m looking for is literally a bed & a bathroom. I’m never super comfortable my first night in a place but I’m only going to be there one night.
My post certainly doesn’t apply to everyone but I believe it applies it applies to enough to affect supply and demand. Especially as my experience with motels in the 2020’s is that you’re likely to catch a disease and one of you needs to sit by the door with a baseball bat.
I’ve stayed in at least 4 motels since 2020 and they all seemed relatively clean and safe.
- Cedar Vista Motel in Tobermory, Ontario: clean and quiet, dog-friendly, owner seemed nice
- Le Nordet in Saint-Georges-de-Malbaie, Quebec: clean and quiet, dog-friendly, nice-looking room, had one day where the room wasn’t cleaned on time but the management resolved it quickly enough
- Travelodge by Wyndham in Florida City, Florida: clean and quiet, easy to get to the Everglades, interesting items in the breakfast bar
- Days Inn by Wyndham in Las Vegas, Nevada: clean, close to the Strip, there was one weird-but-harmless guy who was hanging outside his room for a while and blocking the gangway
We don’t seek out motels specifically, but generally we’re looking for clean, inexpensive places to stay (since we just use them for sleeping).
As a counterpoint, I did a trip around the US last year and stayed in over 30 establishments, not that’s a representative sample but that’s all I got. About half were “park the car in front of the door” motels and I didn’t have a disturbed night’s sleep in any of them. Some would have been 20 or more years old, most wouldn’t. Nor with the “motel with lobby” variant for that matter.
Wow, I’ve driven by that place all my life and never realized it had a full bar inside. Huh.
Now, it’s a very generic looking Galaxy Inn
I’m old enough to remember when Rodeway Inns were once on par with Holiday Inns. Likewise, Ramada Inns but now their hotels also tend to be sketchy.
Speaking of which, I found this ash tray at an antique store a few years ago (I know, an ash tray probably isn’t technically “ephemera”).
Holiday Inn hasn’t used that logo since around 1982, so it’s got to be older than that. I’m guessing 1970s.
Wow, I had no idea. The two I’ve stayed at are so disgusting, and seemingly teeming with criminals that it’s hard to view them as having a brighter past. The one in Seatac had a dirty full-sized fridge in it and so many stains that appeared to be blood and other bodily fluids on the carpet and bedding that we decided to sleep on top, fully clothed. I was so tired when I rode into the Billings location (long motorcycle ride through a very windy WY) that I didn’t notice the several broke down cars in the lot. I’ve now fully learned my lesson.
The places you stayed likely were not originally Rodeway or Ramada Inns. They were independent motels built more than 50 years ago and later acquired by the parent company that holds the rights to the Rodeway Inn name. Hotel and motel chains have been exchanged among numerous large business entities so many times over the last 40 years that most haven’t resembled what they were originally for a long time. In the case of Rodeway, Ramada, and other formerly mid-level chains and franchises, the only things that remain are their names and the nostalgic memories of people over the age of 45 who remember family trips with overnight stays at one of their bland but clean, quiet, and safe hotels.
Incidentally, for those Dopers who’ve traveled in the Western U.S., does it seem to you that Red Lion Inns have slid downhill over the last 15-20 years?
how strange a dennys went out of business …