What place have you stayed at that couldn’t be considered a home of a relative or friend (or your own) that you’ve spent the most nights at?
Myself, I have never been to a week long or more sleepaway camp, so the highest I get is a Holiday Inn in Alexandria VA where I went to a yearly get-together for around 10 years, so I’ve spent almost 30 days there.
Second is the Pine Springs campground at Guadalupe Mountains National Park which I stay at nearly every time I go out west because it is the first place I can stay at around 1 mile altitude to start to slowly acclimate myself. I’ve spent probably 15 nights there.
Elkmont Campground in Smoky Mountains National Park and the Doubletree at Breckenridge are probably tied after that with around 7 days each. Which isn’t amazing in itself, but it is strange to think that in total, I’ve spent almost two months of my life in those 4 places.
It’s got to be a hotel in Las Vegas, although which one will be tough to suss out. Probably either the old Imperial Palace or Palazzo. Both adding up to weeks.
I am currently on a business trip that is part of a series of business trips I’ve taken this year for the same case. By the time I get home, I will have spent a total of 6.5 weeks in the same hotel over the course of the last seven months. For a different case a few years back, I spent seven weeks (over two stays) in the same corporate apartment in Chicago.
For recreational purposes, the closest I can come up with is probably the Rio Hotel/Casino in Vegas. It’s likely I’ve spent more than a month there over the years. I’m struggling to come up with anything else close to that.
I lived in a hotel for almost a year with my family of four. Four of us in two rooms. The Guestinitsa Academie Nayk. In Moscow. My father was on sabbatical, and we were scheduled to be there a year, but our visas got approved only two months at a time (I don’t know why), and so we couldn’t get roomier accommodations. Many Russian families didn’t live in much bigger spaces, so really, we couldn’t complain. Or so my parents kept telling me. I had my own room back in the US.
We were in room 419. No TV, no refrigerator, although there was one of each we could share with the whole floor. We did have a phone. Many of my friends at school didn’t have a phone, so that was pretty exciting to a lot of them. We got a hot plate at some point, I don’t remember when.
But what the hell-- I got to see the Bolshoi almost every weekend.
I just realized that as long as we don’t count the fact that I had different rooms every time I went, I’ve spent about a total of 5 weeks/year at the Renaissance Center in Detroit for 6 years doing press event lighting for GM. So that would far eclipse my time in Havasu Canyon (48 nights) with at least 210 nights.
Second to the hotel in Moscow is the barracks where I did Basic Training. I was there 3 months (Basic is 8 weeks, but there’s in-processing, and out-processing, and waiting for enough people to get there to start a cycle). 60 women in bunks two high in a large room.
Rieger Hall dormitory at KU in Lawrence, Kansas. I’ve stayed there 3 times for workshops or writer’s retreats, a total of 8 weeks. If I can count all KU dormitories as a single “non-home”, then it would be nearly 3 months.
Before I got my own place on the coast, I was still going there a lot, and I was lucky to have stumbled on a sort-of-secret hotel room in this one very conveniently locate place. They have these 2 small rooms that you can’t book online, and they pretty much kept “reserved” for repeat customers. The first time I got to stay there I just so happened to have walked in asking about a room just 5 minutes after someone had called to cancel, and one of the “small rooms” was the only thing they had. It was about 1/3 less than you’d expect to pay, so I said “Sign me up!!” What a deal that turned out to be. The room was on the small side, but plenty big for one or two nights on the weekend, and it was actually in a small, detached building, “the cottage”, so it was very quiet. I’m a light sleeper, so quiet is heaven for me.
Depending on how you count it, either the combination of dorms I was assigned to at various points (because of renovations) during the summer session of my junior/senior year in college, or the single dorm I stayed in during a summer school trip.
I once clerked a trial that required me to work in Monterey County (motion for venue granted) for 4 days out of each week for 4 months. Living in 2 different places is not fun, even if the non-home place is right on Ocean View Blvd. in Pacific Grove. No time to really enjoy it. We worked ourselves to a frazzle.
Probably a little one-room cottage on Singkep Island, Indonesia, for seven weeks. Also two months in Bucharest, Romania, in 1968, staying mostly in a hostel. I considered myself a residednt of Antigua, Guatemala, for seven months, although just staying in traveler accommodations. on a tourist visa.
Well I had the same dorm room for my junior and senior year at college. Does that count?
If dorm rooms don’t count, then I stayed at overnight camp for 8 weeks each when I was 12 and 13.
If overnight camp doesn’t count, I drove around the West in a Dodge Caravan (I think it was) sleeping in it most night. It was never in the same place more than two nights in a row.
If that doesn’t count, it’s probably a rented cabin in Michigan in which I stayed for three to four weeks total over a period of three years.
I probably spent about 4 weeks total at the local Girl Scout camp between first and 6th grades. I did two week-long camps there and then several over-nighters with my troop over the years.
Other than that, I go to a sci-fi movie marathon at Case Western Reserve University every year, in one of the auditoriums. They last 30-36 hours and yes I sleep there, right on the floor beneath the seats. I’ve been to 10 of these events so it’d be like 10 days at the same hotel.
I went to the same Jewish camp for three years, but I didn’t stay in the same cabin each time. It still wouldn’t have beat out Basic Training. But I was a kid, so it seemed longer.
Embassy Suites in downtown Orlando is probably the non-home I’ve stayed at the most times, but they were all one nighters and so it probably is tied for third at 7-10 nights.
I’m personally not counting dorm rooms, unless you were staying there for a short time, but then again I would count summer camp, so it’s a close call. I’m not quite sure why I’d count the one and not the other.
This thread started because I was wondering when a place begins to feel like a home. So I guess with a dorm you stay there long enough to reach that goal. I think that by the middle of the second stay at a summer camp I might begin to get that feel also.
But larger areas need longer because while the Alexandria holiday Inn was certainly becoming familiar, Alexandria and the larger DC area were not. And although I’ve spend around 2 months in Virginia total, the state doesn’t have a homey feel to me. I wonder if I would feel the same if it had been all at once rather than over decades, or all in the same place rather than spread out between Alexandria, other DC suburbs, Roanoke, and other places.