This past week found me staying at two different Motel 6s along I-205 in East Portland---one on east Stark, and the other in Clackamas. Both obviously had been reflagged from other motels, and both were quite passable as lodging. The cheaper rate helped me feel good about my average daily lodging budget, after splurging a bit over the last few weeks.
My vision of Oregon apartments, from the old days when I was a starving student and my friends were the slacker creative types. had been one of moldy, drafty old buildings with substandard plumbing. On this trip, I had decided in advance that I wasn't going to skimp on lodging here, but after a month, having conquered some of those earlier anxieties, I was beginning to relax my standards a bit to my normal U.S. level. I liked thinking that after so many stays lately at Best Westerns and other mid-range places, I could still comfortably "slum it" at a Motel 6 for a few nights, even in Portland.
As I've mentioned in other posts, the issue with Motel 6 is not much the establishments themselves: most of them are decently-run and offer the standard "Army issue motel room," as I call it, with the basic amenities that are highly standardized from one place to another, right down the type of soap and the number of hangers (three standard, three with pants clips), and the package of cable channels.
This standardization is because Motel 6, unlike almost all other flags, is a centralized corporation that owns and operates nearly all its flagged properties. There are no franchised Motel 6 operations, at least in the United States. The staff at each one work for the Motel 6 corporation, in the same way as, say, the employees at a Wal-Mart. As such it's pretty much the opposite of Best Western, all of which are independently owned. As one might imagine, this centralization has both advantages and disadvantages.
And yes, they really do "leave the light on," as it says in their well-known radio commercials. That is, the reception is open and staffed twenty-four hours a day.
On the other hand, they (almost) always charge three bucks a night for wi-fi. At first this sounds like a negative thing, but experience has taught me to welcome this, at least on the budget end of the spectrum. Why? Because if you charge for it, it had damn well better work. The last thing I want to find out upon checking in is that a motel uses an open, free community network (as did the recently reflagged Motel 6 in Los Alamos, New Mexico). They might as well tell me that they have no Internet access at all, because it means I'll be able to load one page per hour if I'm lucky.
For me, the real issue with Motel 6 is the erratic nature of the neighborhoods in which they are located. You never know what you are going to get. Some are located in prime exit-ramp locations, right between top-end hotels like Marriot and Sheraton. The one in Santa Barbara (to be fair, the first ever Motel 6) is right in the prime spot off Cabrillo and offers awesome views of the beach. Others, however, are in less desirable locations, and many of these are ripe for renovation. While staying in the one in Eureka, California, I made sure not to lean too hard on the second-floor wooden railing lest I go tumbling down. They get lots of rain there.
The one on east Stark in Portland, despite having nothing-to-complain-about rooms, was unfortunately in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood. I had already known that when booking it, but decided to give it a whirl anyway.
It was fine during the day, but in the late evening after dark I went out to stretch my legs and found myself uncomfortable on the sidewalk even on a busy thoroughfare. At the corner of 82nd ("The Avenue of the Roses," if one can believe it), I was panhandled from a rail-thin homeless man who could barely stand and whom I could smell from ten feet away. He wanted "ninety cents." Down the block, in front of a well-lit car dealership, I was solicited (I think) by a passing young man with a strange accent who spontaneously mumbled a series of sentences towards me beginning with "Asian ladies. Much love. Waiting for you..." I felt like I was back in central Fresno.
The Motel 6 in Clackamas was in a much nicer neighborhood, on a frontage road atop a hill, right across from the Kaiser Permanente hospital. A Bavarian-themed restaurant next door called Gustav's offers pleasant seating at their bar, as well as a decent flatiron steak. I had no idea what a flatiron steak was before I came to the Northwest on this trip, but it seems to be on the menu of every place that serves beef, including Elmer's, a downscale Northwest version of Denny's. Likewise the "wedge salad" seems to be everywhere on the menu around here as well.
The German restaurant across from the hospital seemed to be the perfect place to pick up nurses. While I sat there eating my steak and drinking my porter, the bar was occupied by a series of attractive young-to-middle-aged women in pairs, chatting over cocktails as if they just got off from work.
Curiously, however, I found no interest in pursuing a conversation with any of them. Instead I watched the television above the bar, even though the sound was turned down. One of the pitchers for the Cincinnati Reds had just thrown a no hitter. Somehow I found that to be much more interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment