dianahooley Out West

Sleeping with Strangers

I never dreamed of living in a motel.  Then my husband had surgery, and the doctor told us we’d need to move 278 miles away for a period of five weeks to be near the hospital.  Suddenly visions of room service danced in my head.  I’ve only known one man, Stu (not his real name), who lived in a hotel.  Stu moved into a big hotel downtown with a ballroom and a red-carpeted staircase.  He dreamed of becoming a movie star and didn’t want to deny himself the finer things of life.  When Stu’s money ran out, he borrowed more.

Reportedly, Stu spent many hours in the hotel hot tub waiting for the call from Hollywood.

But motels are mainly built for transient customers.  The word “motel” is a combination of “motor” and “hotel” and came into common parlance in the 1920’s when people began traveling around in their new horseless carriages.  Motels were never meant to be homes.  When my husband first got the word that a temporary relocation was in our future, I searched for vacation rentals, Airbnb’s, and apartments.  It was only when I lowered my standards from “looking-for-a home” to “looking-for-a bed” that I found a reasonably priced motel room we could live in.

You may be wondering, what’s it like to live in a motel?  Tight, it’s tight.

Motels are not for the obese.  Or clumsy.  If you have great coordination, maybe not elite athlete level, but still you’re flexible enough to move between beds, desks, and sundry other furniture squeezed into a 14 by 12 space—you’re gold.  I am not an elite athlete, but I’m coordinated enough to do the salsa.  This talent, I’m convinced, has helped me avoid serious injury in our motel room.

Motel living presents other challenges too.  With only a microwave and a mini-fridge for kitchen appliances, your menu suddenly becomes very limited.  I’m here to tell you there’s a reason frozen entrees are called that.  If you don’t microwave them a minute more than the package directions, these meals are so icy your teeth can’t “entrée” them.  That’s why we’ve been eating a lot of take-out–and having a lot of take-out, fall out, of the mini-fridge.

I try not to think about all the people that have stayed in our motel room before us.

Still, my eyes glide dubiously over the bed coverlet.  I glare suspiciously in the bathtub.  Yesterday when I swam in the motel pool, a large hairy man with pimples on his back was in the pool with me.  The thought crossed my mind that this man is probably not unlike many who’ve slept in my motel bed.  Slept and farted on my mattress.  That’s the thing about living in a motel room.  Of course people have dragged their crusty skin and weeping sores (of indeterminate origin) across your bed.

Still, I’ve tried to comfort myself with how fresh and clean our motel room smells.  It doesn’t smell like foot fungus.  Then I passed the housekeeper’s cart loaded with linens, towels, and cleaning products.  I noticed instead of multiple bottles of bleach or disinfectant in the cart, several bottles of room deodorant.  Room deodorants, for the uninitiated, are chemical sprays meant to mask offensive odor more than kill the bacteria that caused it.  So our room may smell like a rose, but no doubt there’s bugs on the stem.

And that’s another risk of motel rooms:  bed bugs.

Surely you say, this problem is found only in third world countries where donkeys rule the road.  No, according to www.travelpulse.com at least 45% of hotels IN AMERICA have faced legal action over bed bugs.  That’s enough information to keep me squirming on our motel bed for hours. My farmer husband says sleeping with me is like sleeping with a cow dog who keeps circling the gunny sack in an effort to get comfortable.

I’m not a cow or a dog, but I can say after two weeks in a motel, home on the range sounds much better than home in a motel room.

 

Image credit:  El Rancho Motel      Image credit:  Diana Hooley      Image credit:  Diana Hooley

dianahooley Out West

Finding winter on the Idaho-Montana border…

An old family friend, Jack, told us he’d never move to a place that didn’t have four distinct seasons.  With that statement Jack knocked out a third of the lower 48 states as potential relocation spots.  Much of the northern U.S. though, including Idaho, can reliably lay claim to having a winter, summer, spring, and fall.  At least that’s what I used to think until the last few years, when the hot summer seemed to overtake autumn, and the cold winter shortened to a few weeks around Christmas.

I really didn’t miss winter this year.  It wasn’t until I drove to Leadore, Idaho, a town I’d never visited, that I was reminded of the wonder of winter.

I got an email from a magazine editor asking me if I’d be interested in writing a feature article on Leadore, a little community near the Idaho-Montana border. 

Throwing a bag in my car I wondered whether I should take a jacket or a coat.  As I drove out the driveway, my car thermometer read 42 degrees.

But we live in a mountainous state.  Drive anywhere and you soon experience some kind of altitude and thus, weather change.  I whizzed along the freeway until I turned north and started climbing.  I was thinking about Leadore and how you pronounced the town’s name—it sounds like a woman’s name, a derivative of Leadora perhaps, or Lenore, that lost love of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem.  Pondering all this, I drove over a hill—and into a thick bank of fog.

The fog didn’t lift for miles.  I couldn’t see much beyond 500 feet.  I was surprised when I saw the sign for the Craters of the Moon National Park emerge from the milky sludge.  Feeling chilly, I glanced down at the temperature reading on the dash: 23 degrees.  Somewhere in the fog I’d lost twenty degrees of heat.  The lovely Leadore must be high in the mountains, a mythic goddess in some frozen Idaho Olympus (my thinking was a bit foggy too).

Around a curve and just above the furls of fog smoke, I glimpsed a white mountain peak against a blue sky.  As sudden as it came, the fog fell away, revealing an incredible winter-scape.  I grabbed my sunglasses to protect my eyes from the brightness of the snow fields glistening under the sun. This was a country you could ski in, or skate in, or snowmobile across.  It was breathtaking.

At the little town of Arco, I stopped for gas and stepped out of the car to stretch my legs.  Digging my phone out of my coat pocket, I googled motels in Leadore (maybe Leadora was a madame who ran a boarding house in the 1800’s) and found a phone number for the Leadore Inn.

“Y-ello.  Sam here.”

“Hi!  I’d like to spend the night in Leadore and wonder if you have a room available at your motel?”

“Sorry, we’re closed for the season. We only open in the summer when the hikers come through.”

“Hikers?”

“Uh-huh.  Hiking the Continental Divide Trail.  Leadore’s a resupply stop.  You know, where backpackers get their groceries and mail. Check out The Homestead motel.  They’ve got newer rooms.”—click.Image result for image continental divide trail sign

I called The Homestead and was happy to find a room there.  As lovely as this winter country was, it was also freezing cold.  I didn’t relish the thought of spending the night curled up next to my car heater.

I drove on and entered the remote Lemhi River valley.  It was remarkably empty, except here and there a ranch in the distance.  I was just outside Leadore when I passed an historical marker along the highway.  I backed the car up and stopped to read it:  “Gilmore Mines. Lack of a good transportation system delayed serious lead and silver mining…”

Lead mining?  Lead Ore?  Leadore.  Oh.  Though the town’s name was a disappointment, the town itself was not.  Nestled at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains, Leadore was a village of ice and snow.  My tires crunched past a library, a school, a post office—a small gem in the gem state.  I think Leadore will always be Leadora to me, Leadora the snow princess.

 

Image credit:  Diana Hooley     Image credit:  Continental Divide Trail