Road Trips and Hotels, Then and Now

I've just uploaded to Flickr (for those with access to our family pics) some pictures of Tam and Sarah relaxing in bed in our hotel room watching a DVD (Krypto the Superdog, if you must know) on a portable DVD player while I upload digital pics taken this afternoon to the Internet and begin this blog posting over the hotel's free wi-fi connection. Almost nothing in the sentence I've just written would make any sense at all to someone transported from 1980. ("I've just," "pictures," "bed," "hotel," and a few more.) Quite a bit of it would be meaningless to a time-traveler from 1990, and frankly quite a number of things might be fuzzy even to someone from 2000. My laptop, which itself dates back to 2001, bought just before we went to China for Sarah, has had added to it over the years a wi-fi card, add-on speakers and some other things to try to be up-to-date, but even so its days are numbered.

All of which, being a geezer who will be 60 rather sooner than I like to admit, makes me think of what hotel/motel travel was like when I was growing up. ("Oh, Dad, not againnnnn....") Today, driving down through southern Maryland, we passed some of the old motels from the 50s and 60s. They look so small today, the little cabins and such. Those that are still in business seem to be in the no-tell motel line of work, not designed for a family or, necessarily, for staying the entire night. But families stayed in them back in the day, because it's what there was.

In 1958, almost half a century ago now, my Dad was moving from Montgomery Ward to Sears and had to do a week's training somewhere (Kansas City? Oklahoma City? Not sure now, but out of town), while my Uncle Miles and Aunt Kathy Landis were going West on a combination vacation and business trip with Miles having meetings in Canada and New Mexico. They asked my Mom and me (since my Dad would be away) and my cousin Steve Jones (then of Oklahoma City; now of Nashville when last heard from) to go with them. I'd never been west of Kansas, never seen the Rockies, never been in a foreign country (wild, exotic Canada!), never even seen a real desert. I got to do all those things, and to see the "wild" West at a time when every other TV show was a Western. It was a tremendous opportunity. We went to Dodge City (Wyatt Earp! Matt Dillon!), Colorado Springs, up through Wyoming to do Yellowstone, then up through Idaho and Washington to British Columbia, then down through Utah and New Mexico. It was a trip to remember, if not the trip of a lifetime (I've been weirder places since, obviously), then the trip of my youth. [And even the exotic places are alike these days. All over China we saw McDonalds; at Golani Junction in Galilee, where a key battle of Israel's war of independence was fought and virtually within sight of the Horns of Hattin of Crusades fame, there are the Golden Arches. In the 1950s, which I'm reminiscing about, the British retook Nizwa, Oman, using airplanes against sword-wielding fighters on horseback. By the time I got to Nizwa, in the 90s, it had a KFC.] Oh yes, I was 10, just about to turn 11. That may be the perfect time: old enough to know what you're seeing, young enough to be open and un-cynical about it.

We stayed in a different motel every night. Some may have been part of loose chains like Best Western, but they weren't clones of each other like the average Hampton Inn or Comfort Inn or Ramada today. I have photos still of some of them. I've tried -- since my father-in-law still lives in Colorado Springs and we get out there periodically -- to locate where we stayed in 1958; I think it's gone, or so transformed as to be unrecognizable. The motel rooms were invariably small, a TV if you were lucky (three channels in the big towns, one at most in the little ones if there was a TV at all), maybe a phone. air conditioning still new enough to be advertised on the sign.

Two other things stick with me from that trip. The Interstate Highway system was just beginning; we would find construction all over the place, and a certain amount of new highway here and there, but mostly we were still on the old two-lane roads, and a good four lane still had stoplights. (Oh, and roadmaps were still free at every filling station.) You drove through downtown, even in Denver or Cheyenne or Salt Lake City you went down the main drag. And it was the last era before franchise food chains. Every meal was in a different restaurant, and a different menu. About the only real national franchise was Dairy Queen, and they only did ice cream in those days. McDonalds I think was just starting up; the first ones I remember in Joplin would have been a couple of years later.

Sarah will never know that world. Barring a nuclear war, she'll never know TV without 100 channels, or a world without an Internet and Google. But neither do a lot of people only a few years younger than I. That 1958 trip sticks with me, especially when I look at what we're doing right now: I'm posting this, and before I walk across the room after finishing it anyone on earth can read it. Sarah's watching a DVD in bed. The DVD can hold more information and last longer than four or five huge movie-theater 35mm film reels could in the 50s.

A few other hotel/motel memories. My Uncle, Bill Jones, lived in Osawatomie, Kansas (of John Brown of Osawatomie fame). He worked for the Missouri Pacific railroad; Osawatomie was where the Missouri Pacific's Kansas City area headquarters were. When we visited we always stayed at his house, but when he died in 1962, too many relatives were showing up at once, so we had to stay in a hotel. Osawatomie has the usual chain hotels now (I get 10 on Google), but in 1962 the choice was the railroad hotel downtown. The railroad hotel was (surprise!) over the railroad station. An old hotel, like something out of the 1930s as I recall it, with the added benefit that periodically just as you were getting back to sleep A TRAIN WOULD RUMBLE THROUGH.

One last travel/hotel memory and then I'll post this and go back to reading Middle Eastern newspapers online. (Only a few years ago you had to wait several days at best. Now I have the major papers from Beirut, Cairo, Jerusalem, etc. bookmarked. But that's another story...

Sometime in the 60s [update: Google tells me 1967], after my mother's death, my Dad and I were on a trip hunting family clues in the Ozarks. It just happened to be the day the last episode of the Fugitive was going to be on, in which the One-Armed Man finally gets found. We ended up in a little motel in either Reeds Spring or Reeds Spring Junction, MO. Ozark readers will know these places. (I think it was Reeds Spring Junction.) The motel was in the hills and the nearest TV stations were in Springfield. (Branson was not, believe me, anything like it is now, Ozark readers.) There was no cable, no satellite TV, just whatever the rabbit ears brought in. We tried watching The Fugitive on the tiny black-and-white TV in the room. Just as Richard Kimble, Lieutenant Girard, and the one-armed man all got to the final confrontation, the picture, which at best had been a very fuzzy blend of grays, disappeared altogether, and so did the sound. What happened? Did Kimble get off? Would we ever know?

So, of course, we just looked for the video on YouTube, right? No, I actually think I've still never seen the final episode of the fugitive. I suppose it is on YouTube by now. And 1967 was 40 years ago now.

Do I miss travel in those days? Maybe I miss the diversity: each place was different, not the same mix of Wal-Marts, McDonalds and Applebee's. Roads went down the main streets of the towns, not bypassing them without stopping. (If you've seen Cars you'll have a sense of the nostalgia I feel about that 1958 trip.) It's a little too much like work to know that I can know exactly what's happening all over the world from my room in this Hampton Inn in Maryland. In one sense, if you're always in touch, you're never on vacation. But I can do this. I can write this and it can be available to anyone on earth with Internet access within seconds. Tradeoffs. And, of course, I didn't have to go to work every day and pay the mortgage and stuff either, so that too is part of the charm. And Elvis hadn't gone Vegas yet.

Oh, Dadddd....you're doing it againnnnn....