Unless it’s the White Horse Inn, in which case you can’t move for people singing and dancing.
But a really traditional inn should have a house dog (woe betide anyone who sits in its seat), an oldest inhabitant and/or village idiot (woe betide, etc.,), who will tell you when “it was all fields round here”, and a jolly but no-nonsense barmaid.
What were the practices of old-school Italian osterie [inns] and trattorie? Same as any other inn? (I think there are some stories in the Decameron where people go out to eat?)
Old joke: Why wasn’t Jesus born in [your most disliked city]? They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.
Along those lines, there used to be a motel in The Dalles, Oregon named Inn at The Dalles. It was strung out along the top of a bluff and had a large sign that you couldn’t miss from eastbound I-84. I never stayed there, but got the impression it was a rather shoddy place. But I long thought it should have been renamed The Farmer Inn. (For those who don’t get it, combine the name of the inn with the name of the town.)
Googling (I haven’t been through The Dalles in a while) I find someone’s bought it and refurbished it and renamed it. Unfortunately, they chose the name Celilo Inn.
Brings to mind too the joke about “The Olde Log Inn”. less PG.
You mean Days Inn isn’t traditional?
This is also a good point.
The original Inn on the Park was a Motor Inn on King W.
I consider an inn to be more rustic, as opposed to a motor inn, which is just a motel.
My rule of thumb is that if somewhere adopts the word “inn” in its name and advertising - it probably isn’t (though it may well be a very welcoming and comfortable hostelry of some other sort).
I mean historically restaurants are a fairly new phenomenon. Right? As in only a century or two at hhe most!
More like 4.
That’s a good choice. Far from being some vanishingly rare option, the concept of pubs/inns/small hotels that you are thinking of are very common in the UK and often really good value.
They are nice options for exactly the reasons you say, nice pub downstairs with a restaurant, a little room just upstairs and breakfast in the morning.
Yeah, IIRC a “motor inn” is just an older name for what we call a motel today.
From what I understand, when Americans first started taking long trips by car, when they wanted to stop for the night people would just find a field, ask the farmer for permission to camp there for the night, and maybe pay him a few dollars for the trouble. Some of those farmers realized there was a business opportunity there, and started building cabins on their property that they would rent to travelers for the night. Those collections of cabins came to be knows as “motor courts” or “motor inns”, which over time evolved into the modern motel.