I pulled in to the Americana Inn in Flagstaff off Route 66 the third night of our journey home. My boys were enervated after a day drawn out by eating in at restaurants with long waits and a fruitless search in Gallup for the nightly Native American dancing advertised on a poster board outside Albuquerque. My youngest was at the melt down point where he could only wail and bemoan all that was wrong, which was everything since the only thing that would be right was sleeping.
The first thing to greet us was a man with long, white hair and beard biking furiously toward the office from the back of the inn. He ran in to an obstacle and spent the 5 minutes it took me to extract my children from the car favoring his injuries and correcting his bike. I was leery already. Was this the kind of motel where locals stayed who couldn't gain housing because of criminal records or deleterious lifestyles?
Inside, on the other hand, the front desk clerk was friendly and sympathetic to my need to quickly get the kids to bed. He apologized for giving us a second floor room and sent us on our way.
I pulled around to the back of the motel, and my spirits sunk further. It felt like a seedy inn. Areas of the walk way were damaged, with planks of unfinished plywood affording a measure of safe perambulation. The same plywood acted as a ramp up unusable stairs, and it appeared to have weathered quite some time in its position rather than acting as a temporary measure until repairs could be made. My son asked why the plank was there, and I hemmed and hawed, not wanting him to feel the unease I was experiencing.
Opening the door to our room, I found spacious accommodations with 2 queen beds. This was the only pleasant aspect of our lodgings. It was stifling in the room, so I checked the thermostat to turn on the air. The thermostat had only a temperature dial, which was already turned on low while the temperature gauge still read 80 degrees. There would be no air for us tonight, and it was too warm to be comfortable. My oldest complained that he could not breathe, and in my stress I did little to comfort him. Instead, I turned down my sheets, expecting to sleep under just the top sheet so I would have cover without heat. Alas, I found crumbs on the crib sheet and was forced to sleep on the top sheet with a hot comforter for my blanket.
I searched for a plug to charge my cell phone and found another unwelcome sign. A used water bottle lay abandoned behind the night stand. It appeared the house cleaning in the room was minimal rather than thorough.
Turning on enough lights to see I discovered badly patched holes in the walls and ceiling. When I flushed the toilet, it protested loudly for several minutes with a squealing sound. After washing my hands I found no hand towel present. Securing the door in this sketchy place also proved a challenge because the latch was missing the ball that the hook grabs, so I pushed a table against the door.
If my children hadn't been beyond relocating, I would have insisted on a refund and left immediately. As it was, I decided we would sleep and move out quickly in the morning. Unfortunately sleep proved nearly impossible for me. This inn also seemed to be the kind that teenagers use to party and nasty men to bed a prostitute. Downstairs I could hear the young, shrill peals of girls and the laugh of the guy they were with, as though they were playing a drinking game. When that noise finally abated I drifted off to sleep a few hours until I heard a man and woman entering the room next door around 3:00 AM. The moaning started soon thereafter, as did the wall being slammed by bodies and knocked by the headboard.
Exhausted, when light finally started pouring in to my room, I arose to ready myself and vacate immediately. It was still too early, though, to waken the kids. I decided to use the free internet access to write Travelocity to let them know how terrible the accommodations were. Unsurprisingly, the security code the morning clerk provided me did not work on the Wi-Fi. So I headed out to my car to pack up.
Descending the upper level of steps, I found that the decrepit plank across the stairs was not a fix for broken steps, but a make shift ramp for the cleaning crew. Further, the plank I had perceived to be covering a broken area of the walk way under the stairs was actually flanking an uneven hole in the concrete around a pipe, but off the sidewalk. Perhaps, with a trash can sitting in the parking lot at the foot of the stairs and the cleaning equipment piled around the cavity in the concrete, it was as dilapidated as I originally thought, but not as precarious.
As I loaded up my car, the door beneath our room opened. A mother and her teenage daughter stepped out into the sunlight, leaving their room open with all its disarray on display as they departed. It seemed that I was right about a teenager in the room below us, but probably not about the party. Was it possible that mom and daughter were staying up late watching some amusing movie and laughing over it together?
Before launching the final leg of our journey home, I swung by the front office for some ice and to use the microwave. The gentleman handling the front desk was just as pleasant and accommodating as the young man was the night before.
So I left, exhausted and feeling that the place was certainly rundown and unkempt, but not quite so menacing.
