If you enjoy sleeping in a scene from a horror movie, this is the motel for you! When you drive up, you discover the place lends new meaning to the word “isolated.” Surrounded by degraded infrastructure, abandoned buildings, and broken asphalt for a half-mile in any direction, the only sign of life is a Love’s truck-stop gas station. The effect is even more dramatic when you arrive at night. The former Super8 sign is broken, meaning, the glass is entirely missing, and it only recognizable by shape of the rusted shell. The building itself is so dark and decrepit upon approach, you wouldn’t even know there is an operating establishment, at first glance. I had to drive the perimeter twice to find the tiny neon “Open” sign, indicating the lobby. I was checked in by a kind and friendly desk attendant, who sent me to the room I had reserved job the main phone line. I was placed adjacent to a couple staying long-term that felt quite comfortable yelling at each other from the room to the parking lot with the door open, and while a baby cried and a toddler protested. For possibly the first time in my life, I requested a room change, and was moved next to a nice middle-aged former hippie and his elderly mother, who offered me pumpkin bread. Unfortunately, they had the TV turned up loud for her, and the walls are paper-thin. As I was on a cross country drive and needed sleep, I asked to be moved again. I was trying to understand how the place was dark and deserted, and yet kept winding up next to loud neighbors. The kind desk attendant then went on a quest to find me a room with some quiet and a mini-fridge. This was a challenge, because every room was missing something - a chair, a TV, a lamp, and most often, a mini-fridge. A high-value item for guest theft, apparently. He did insist that people generally do not mess with the cars in the parking lot. I attempted to feel reassured. In the end, he moved me, along with a fridge from another room, into second-floor quarters on the even creepier backside of the building, along a catwalk, patrolled by, well, cats. There is an entire feral colony that would slip in and out of the bushes, and leave evidence of their surveillance by occasionally defecating on the upper and lower walkways. I should mention here that during my tour of rooms, I also discovered the non-smoking rooms and the smoking rooms alike smell equally of smoke. Some of the coverlets have cigarette burn holes. Some of the doors look like there had been a recent struggle on one side or another. Some of the drawers in the desks were broken and falling down. Some of the bathrooms included a cockroach jump-scare amenity. Some have sinks that don’t drain. The appalling conditions were juxtaposed against how pleasant everyone was, minus the one shouting couple. A couple of men traveling in a fancy flatbed truck who looked like they were out to do some landscaping work chatted with me amiably about how sketchy it looked when they drove up. In the morning, after I had spent a fitful night waking and wondering if the propane heating would kill me and I would end up on the news because there were no carbon monoxide or fire alarms to be seen anywhere, I ran into two tidy and good-natured little girls being sent off for their day by their grandmother. They politely asked if they could pet my dogs, and then sat on the crumbling concrete front step to, I presume, wait for the school bus. This island of ex-urban squalor is not a place for children, was my only persistent thought. I wish I had taken photos in the dark because that view was something I will never forget. So, in all, if emotional distress and physical discomfort are your jam, this place is a bargain. You get what you pay for.
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