This place was a bit icky, though probably the nicest in this thread. The ickiest part was that the entire building smelled like hot dogs, but there were no vendors or anything like it in the vicinity.
Our porn was free. Including warning-free. I thought to myself that the family at the other end of the motel will be very upset when the kids turn on the tv. There were no other channels. Just porn.
I’m curious - has anyone here ever actually stayed at South of the Border?
Hotel Zöch, across from the train station in Vienna (I forget which one–Vienna is one of those cities with multiple intercity train stations that you use depending on which direction you’re heading.
There was no electricity and I think we were the only ones in the place besides the night clerk. Since I was the only one of my group who could speak German, I asked for a discount as there were no lights, and he gave me a whopping five per cent. It wasn’t one of my best negotiations.
We use those in prisons. They’re designed for use in places where you expect people to try to smash the toilets.
Then there was the place I used to stay at in London, near Lancaster Gate. I was taking my morning shower and heard someone pounding on the door. When I answered, I was told that water from my shower was dripping down into the kitchen. Gave me a very secure feeling about the condition of the flooring.
The seediest motel we have ever stayed in was the Blue Spruce (or something like that) in Gallup New Mexico. The room was cheap and we needed a place to sleep. The room was pleasantly and surprisingly clean and the place looked OK (before the sun went down) and the room was only 25 or 30 bucks.
After we checked the room out, we went to go get some dinner, at the Ranch Kitchen - which was fantastic, by the way.
We came back, and it was apparent that some, well most of the rooms were rented out as “extended stay” and the people were, um, interesting.
We both laid there in a light sleep, mildly paranoid by each little noise, and I would go to the window and peek to check to see if my car was OK/still there.
That was the only night we have ever “slept” with the pistol ON the nightstand (at home or away).
Would a “vacation home” count as an inn?
We rented what looked like a romantic old-world home in the countryside of France. It was called a “gite”, but I’d call it a “git”. It was indeed old-world. It was probably a shepherd’s hovel dating from medieval times. The TV didn’t work, the beds were all mattresses laid on the floor and covered with plastic pee-proof covers, none of the cloth sheets fit any of the beds, and the place was running with house centipedes. I discovered the latter in the middle of the night while taking a pee. One of them came running at full speed across the floor, its legs brushing my toes and causing me to cut off peeing in mid-stream. If you’ve ever seen the Absolutely Fabulous episode where Eddie and Patsy were trying to stay in a wretched stone farmhouse in Provence, battling roaches and boredom, you’d have an idea of what this place was like. After a couple of days, we checked out and moved into a Holiday Inn (or some such equivalent) in a large nearby city. Never again!
I don’t know the name of it, or even exactly where it was, but it was in Ocala. We went for a spontaneous road-trip, ended up in Ocala the weekend of the Daytona 500 and there was literally no place else to stay. What a little shit-hole. I didn’t sleep the whole night. Himself did, though.
When I first moved to San Francisco, late '96, I stayed at the Crown Hotel, a cockroach haven at Valencia and 16th (Quite a hipster hood for the last 5-10 years). It wasn’t too bad. $90 per week, and relatively quiet for its type of hotel. Only very occasional prostitutes in the halls, lots of drunks and druggies, though. I was threatened by a completely insane resident once who objected to me knocking on my friend’s door, which was across from his.
The only horribleness was the cockroach problem. If you’ve never had one, you can’t imagine it. Hundreds of them. I’d put thick tape, sticky-side up, around the sink, and when I got back from farting around all day, it’d be covered in stuck roaches. It was before I’d heard of boric acid, which is, supposedly, a miracle cure.
Joe
Congress Hotel, Baltimore, mid-1980s. It was, um, interesting… obviously at some point pre-WW2 it had been swank, hotel but boy, had it gone downhill (along with the entire neighborhood) without any attention ever since. Furnishings obviously obtained wherever they could rustle up each random piece; linens, towels and curtains still stamped with multiple other institutional/commercial logos. Threadbareness as a motif. Many rooms w/o ensuite baths. Odd noises of things creeping, crawling and chewing within the walls. (Then again, the building used to house in the basement the Marble Bar,the preeminent punk/wave/HC club in B’more of the era. So thrashedness was something of a theme.)
Was abandoned at the end of the 80s and even condemned in the 90s but eventually got gutted and redone as apartments in a gentrification effort (though W. Franklin St. last I checked seems rather resistant to gentrification…)
A nameless hotel outside Petra, Jordan.
-Dead cockroaches on the floor
-A soiled pair of women’s underwear in the cupboard
-A fungus growing between the wall and the plaster that was strong enough to break the plaster right off
-A shower that required one to hold a metal hose thus allowing you to receive periodic electrical shocks whenever the water heater kicked in. Also, the shower drain would back up and produce a slurry not unlike something one might find in the alley behind the Mos Eisley Cantina
-The best was the toilet. The seat was completely broken off, of course. When I leaned over to grab some TP, the entire toilet came with me and ripped right out of the floor. It was balanced on its edge. When I dropped it back down to the floor, my shorts, which were around my ankles, got trapped between the toilet and the floor and began feverishly wicking whichever brown mystery fluid one might find underneath your average Jordanian toilet. Lovely. Try and get out of that Chinese finger trap before the goo gets you!
-Indiana Jones and the last Crusade playing 24 hours a day on a permanent loop, blasting at 1000 decibels from the lobby
-"Ice cream sandwiches for sale in the lobby that were, in fact, not ice cream but flavoured frozen margarine. Yum.
Good Times.
The “Heart of Wilmington” in Wilmington, NC, circa 1980. My father and I stayed there once on a vacation trip up the Outer Banks. The carpet was so dirty that in doing nothing but walking from the bed to the bathroom and back, the bottoms of my white socks turned almost black. It was like there had been a fire or something. Shudder.
Without question, the **Jayhawk Motel ** in Lawrence, Kansas.
We rolled into town late, I dropped the wife and kid at the office and went to fill the tanks and get some milk for the kid and a few beers.
When I got back, I noticed the sign on the office saying “No refunds after 20 min” and a dude peeing in the parking lot. I got a bad feeling.
The room was horrible! Filthy top to bottom, thin to the point of see-thru (yet remarkable stiff) bedspread, exposed wiring and burn marks around one of the electrical outlets etc etc. Really horrible, even by my standards.
As soon as the kid stepped out of the bath, we dressed him and I went to the office to tell them we weren’t staying or paying! I was prepared to administer an asskicking if need be. They gave me the creditcard slip with no problems and we motored out of there as fast as we could.
That seems like a pretty good deal for the shady, pre-maturely ejaculatory set.
First roadside establishment that comes to mind: The Winkin’ Lantern at the intersection of CA 108 and 120. Reason for staying: It had the closest room to a Dead/Santana show at the Caleveras County Fairgrounds.
Runner-up: The Harmony Motel in 29 Palms, Ca. (not seedy so much, more like *funky *and worn out) Reason for staying: a nasty cold front blew into the high desert, and we were seeking warmth and dryness. I didn’t realize until later that U2 had stayed there when they were prepping “The Joshua Tree”.
I once lived (not stayed, but lived for a year) at the “Hollywood C” Motel. A friend claimed that the C was two grades below A, but I think it was because of a broken sign that once said “Hollywood-Cahuenga”. $45/month. My room had a refrigerator and unlike some other units, a door to the bathroom.
I was warned to bring a giant can of cockroach spray and used it liberally, pissing off my landlady, who hated the smell. When I went to get linens in her apartment once, she opened the closet door and said to the copious cockroaches, “Shoo! Shoo!” which was her substitute for the smelly spray.
The floor below housed a porn shop, but they kept to themselves. All the occupants of the motel were people pretty much like me, down on their luck at the time, and typically denizens for just a few months before moving on. I was pleasantly surprised how we looked out for each other and got along in spite of the different hours some worked and how different we were.
It was just a short bus ride to the Hollywood strip and where I got started in the music biz. When the guy who worked in the donut shop got off work, he brought everyone who was up a bag of donuts. When the gal who worked the chicken shop across the street got off, she brought us lots of chicken. I supplied the rock music and hifi system with color organ, and made my friends eyeglasses at the lab where I worked days. Weekends after I got off playing bar piano, we went back to my place for more merriment and music, then breakfast at Denny’s.
Yes, the sex was pretty free and frequent. AFAIK, no “professional” hookers lived or worked there, it was just California youth and freedom. It was one of the best times of my life.
Ohhhh, which one? I stayed at the Catholic Mission and found it quite charming- at least compared to the rooftops and riverbanks that I slept on the majority of my trip.
One, after nearly getting robbed by a minibus driver, I ended up stranded at night in a Hondoran border town. We asked in our nearly non-existant Spanish if there was a hotel around. They led us someplace and we followed.
We put down our sacks and enjoyed the town’s nightlife, which consisted mostly of evengelical churches trying to out sing each other. By the time we got in we were tired and went to sleep.
It wasn’t until morning that we really realized it’s not normal for a hotel to have six bunk beds in a room. Or bars on the windows. Or armed guards outside. That’s right. They put us in the jail.
Two places come to mind. All I can remember about either is the location, not the name.
The oldest was from back in the 50’s when we went to Destin. The falling-down place was across the highway from the beach and its back looked out over a city dump. My brother and I told the hotel manager they ought to change the name of the place from whatever Sea Breeze or Silver Sands or Gulf Valhalla name it had to Dump View.
The latest was this alleged 4-star (AAA rating) place in Sturbridge, Mass., where we spent a night on the way to Camden. The sheets were thin enough to read through, there was dirt on the floors, the walls between rooms were thin enough you could hear breathing in the next room, the bathroom floor was linoleum and wobbled when you walked on it, and the thermostat didn’t work. To avoid this place, it might be wise to pick another stop on I-84 or I-90 than Sturbridge. The only thing going for the stop was a great seafood joint near the hotel. But I wouldn’t spend the night there for the food.
I’m waiting to hear what Siam Sam has to say…