Motel Sleaze Factor

We've stayed in some lovely motels...and then Mon. night there was the worst imaginable.

Here's one example that took it to a 0 rating in a 1-10 sleaze chart.

After moving from room number one (as a non-smoking room it stunk!) I didn't have one that was on the first floor, but up an elevator along a balcony to the end of it...it was ok, especially since the manager carried half my luggage up for me.  But within a minute I noticed there were no pillowcases on the 3 pillows.  So I called Jerry (manager) who said he'd send his 'man' up. That 'man' said he was housekeeping...and wore latex gloves, and said he used to be landscaping, but got this job offer. He then proceeded to put the pillow under his chin with full beard, to pull on the pillowcase. I pointed that out to him, so the other 2 were done by just pushing pillows into cases.  But wait, there's more.

This actually puts this Rodeway Inn of Pueblo CO into negative numbers.  When I descended the elevator in the morning to check out...the elevator had a huge puddle of pee in the corner, including some streaks along the wall. I told the day manager, and he said lots of folks had dogs...and I told him about the wall. He sent another guy "housekeeper" to get a mop.  There were a bunch of other men hanging around.  Some women were going up and down stairs, carrying breakfast boxes from a nearby restaurant..and there was a man with 2 toddlers and 2 strollers, who used the elevator before it got mopped, so his wheels probably got some moisture on them. There was a man with mop going to the elevator as we loaded the car. This was not the only place that I got the feeling that people were living in motels...weekly rates were posted here. Another place had patio furniture and plants outside the doorway to one room.

We were really glad to leave that place...and decided to look more closely at what we were renting from then on. As 2 single women traveling across country, we rented separate rooms each night...and wanted quality at low costs.  But this time we decided there was a limit!

Unfortunately there was no way to tell by the name of a chain, we would sometimes get really nice rooms at low costs at one motel, then the next one of the same name would either be shoddy or higher cost.  I guess if we'd been using the same chain and knew when and where we'd be stopping it would have been easier (as well as knowing what the prices would be in advance.) But with traffic and construction along the interstates, we never could tell where we'd probably be at sunset (about the time we usually started looking.) I'd do the cell phone search, and start calling for availability, but usually wouldn't get information in time for us to drive into a driveway. So this has been an interesting learning experience.

Our decisions often were such that we wanted to sleep on the other side of major cities, so we wouldn't run into morning rush hour traffic.  That worked so well, we never (in our 7 days on the road) drove through morning or evening rush hour at any of the cities we went through.