Vintage Motels

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As promised, an explanation as to my endless delight with hotels:

Vintage Motels

(No, that's not me. That's my roommate during my first year at UT Austin. That was my shirt.)

I love hotels. My fascination with hotels amounts to my appreciation of these three things: 

Design

Travel

History/Nostalgia

Wrapped up in all of those things are sentimentality, respect for change, romance, creativity, imagination, and grit.

Hotels embody specific style and design elements. From a purely aesthetic perspective, I love to check everything out and temporarily live in a new environment.

I love the excitement that comes with traveling. I love new experiences. I like abandoning my usual way of living, but still being able to choose the kind of ambience to perfectly fit the trip. I like becoming immersed as much as possible in a new place and experiencing local flavor with a foreign view. I  notice the little things. I notice things most people wouldn’t care about. 

The historical and nostalgic part definitely applies to my love of motels, seedy places, and vintage hotel signs. You see outdated styles that may actually get repurposed in contemporary hotels or chíc boutique hotels. I’ve traveled my whole life, so I’m able to compare all kinds of different hotels since the late 70’s -- roadside hotels like the Holiday Inn and La Quinta, cheap motels like the Como Motel in Plano, The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, penthouse suites in downtown Austin, boutique hotels in Houston and on the San Antonio Riverwalk, rooms rented in people’s homes in the Mediterranean, hotels built into mountains in Colorado or along the jagged ocean in Capri. Sometimes there’s an unusual dichotomy between the star level (or lack thereof) of the hotel and the surrounding area. 

I like really nice hotels and I like really horrible motels. I prefer to stay in the former, but the cheesy, urban, gritty feel of motels makes me think of grindhouse films, horror movies, and B movies -- of which I’m a big fan. It’s reality vs. art. I also am intrigued by the lives of people whose motel room is their home. 

I guess, in a small nutshell, that explains my love of hotels and motels.