A Room Without a View
This week we are hopping from one roadway hotel to the next. Tuesday night was in the Holiday Inn Express in Richfield, Utah. It is right next to Rt. 70 and part of a highway exit dedicated to Rt. 70 travelers. Everything you need is within a hundred yards; a gas station, a minimart, a McDonalds and slightly better restaurant for those preferring not-so-fast food. The hotel has dug itself into the hillside presumably to baffle the highway noise. That worked well and while we couldn’t hear the highway, we also couldn’t see further than ten feet out our window. On Wednesday night we stayed in a Quality Inn and Suites in Limon, Colorado. It had the same array of roadside vendors as Richfield and while not quite as close to Rt. 70 and not dug into a hill, it looked out at a truck parking lot. Please understand, I was not looking for the cheapest place to stay, but rather the best place that was the right distance (more or less) on the path we were taking. Roadtripping America does not want or need expensive upscale hotels. Outside of major cities there are simply no or few hotels other than large chains price-pointed for the average traveler on a budget.
I admire these chains for understanding their market. Travelers care about cost, cleanliness, decent pillow-top beds, working showers, fluffy towels, flat-screen cable TV, and free breakfast rooms with lots of cereal, milk, coffee and toast (eggs and fruit preferred, but optional). There are no mini-bars, but all have mini-fridges. They all have shampoo, but few offer Q-tips. There are no fancy lobbies, but many have indoor pools to attract the family traveler. I’m guessing these roadside spots do 99% of their trade in one-nighters where frills like early check-in or late check-out are not on the menu. The clerks are certainly minimum-wage workers who double as breakfast porters. There is nothing fancy in cross-country travel, but there is a system designed to give the traveler basic wanted services at a high value point. It must be a good business as there are dozens of hospitality companies that get the capital to lay down foundations and build these basic per-room structures. We are not yet at the point of space constraint like Japan ,where sleeping pods are still the urban order of the day, but our roadside is just a small step behind that in frugality.
Last night we stayed with our dear friend Kate, who lives in Kansas City. She is a divorced single woman with grown children. She has a lovely new suburban home that she is retrofitting to her style liking. Kate was a gracious hostess that served us a lovely and cool summer dinner of pork/rice salad, gave us two well tailored beds and a bathroom with everything we needed. She also cooked us a pleasant breakfast of poached eggs and Canadian bacon on all-grain toast. This was all a big upgrade from our two nights of roadside inns. There were no flat-screen TV’s but the quality of the meals, company and fine touches made this a wonderful oasis in the middle of the country for us. It was so much fun seeing and staying with her that we agreed to stop for another taste of her hospitality on our return trip in four weeks. It makes suffering the roadside hostels worth a few days of imperfection knowing we’ll have Kate’s fresh and pleasant home to welcome us.
Strangely enough, the guest room I stayed in at Kate’s was, in the mid-century style of the house, designed with small ceiling-height lateral windows designed to let in light, but decidedly not for expansive views. The house has a nice view out the back over a right-sized back deck, but no view from the bedrooms. So once again, despite a wonderful stay, but a room without a view.
Tonight we are checked into a Drury Plaza directly next to the Saarinen 630-foot Gateway Arch that sits on the banks of the Mississippi River. We are very pleased to be so close to such a noteworthy attraction as the Arch, but funny thing…the hotel doesn’t really have a direct view of the Arch. If you step out the door and stand on the corner , you can see the fullness of this amazing 1965 structure, the tallest man-made attraction in the Western Hemisphere. Strangely enough and for purely coincident reasons, the New York Wheel that I worked to build for six years was to be 630 feet as well. The difference is that the Arch was built for $82 million in today’s dollars where we were to spend $620 million….and couldn’t even do it for that price.
When we checked into our dog-friendly room at the Drury, we found we had been given an inside room that has a window out onto the interior sunlit hallway. In other words, we have absolutely no view from this room. Indeed, I’ve stayed in a lot of imperfect hotel rooms all around the world (including India, Africa and remote parts of Latin America) and I don’t recall ever being given an interior no-view-at-all room. It so happens that for one night we don’t really care so we made no fuss, thinking it might have been related to our need for a pet-friendly room. But it does add yo my story of our cross-country hotel odyssey.
I’m pretty sure tomorrow will be better at the lovely boutique hotel in Wabash, the Charley Creek Inn. Of course, a view of downtown Wabash, Indiana is quite a bit shy of a world-winning view, not meaning to denigrate Kim’s home town. I have no clue how the Drury Plaza in Downtown Cleveland is situated or what kind of view room we are likely to get assigned. Maybe we will look out over the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame or Lake Erie, or maybe the booking.com value proposition will give us another interior room or a view of an A/C duct. Strangely enough, the thing I like most about booking.com is the ease with which I can cancel my room plans through them. That very feature may prove useful if our next Drury Plaza room is as uninspired as this one. You see, I’ve booked four Drury’s on this trip and already cancelled one, so I stand on alert on the issue.
The E.M.Forster novel made into a 1985 movie with Maggie Smith. Helena Bonham Carter and Dude Dench, A Room With a View, is the story that gives rise to my story. That story is set in Florence and involves the romantic and gracious gesture of two men who give up their view rooms to two women upset by their lack of a view. We are sturdy travelers who are not spending a summer in Florence, so we do not need nor do we seek redress of our viewless existence this week. We are spending all day each day looking through our windshield at the glorious view that a cross-country tide affords us. I can even argue that our view overload is such that we can use a break from views at night.
That said, I do look forward to getting to my home in Ithaca with its vast countryside views front and back. For now I am happy with my room without a view.