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Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Guests of the Video Martyr Blog stayed at the grand "Gray's Motor Village"

There are a million of these postcards out there, because there were (and are) a million Motor Hotels, better know as "mo-tels" out there.  This one was worth posting because someone had taken almost all the "free" stuff from the desk stand and saved it from a vacation they took a long, long time ago.

As a kid, I remeber driving by many of these places...each one looked, even at 50 mph like their postcard. A veritable oasis is a time before urban sprawl, and a certain relief from vinyl car seats that stuck to your skin because air conditioning was either a "luxury option" or too weak to reach the kids. "That pool has a slide! Oh! Can we stay there!?" The eventual response was, "Don't worry, we'll be there soon."  Where "soon" meant another hour and 45 minutes.
Someone did a nice job with the artist's rendering of the main building on the matchbook cover. But the matches were even better.
Unfortunately, there is no high diving board that I can see, and I am pretty sure the bathing beauty that just hangs in mid-air is a myth as well, too bad. Fortunately, Gray's Motor Village was easy to get to from anywhere.
 Do you remember the ones you drove by as a kid?  Did you stop? Did you ever get to see if it was as good as it seemed from the road?

3 comments:

  1. Well, we've stayed at a lot of motels in my life. When I was 16 my folks decided to drive Route 66 (as much as was drivable in the '90s) all the way from Chicago to LA. We stayed in several motels that were along there. However, one of the best was one of the two tee-pee shaped ones. (Not the one where they were obviously just for sex now as their sign even says to "Do it in a tee-pee" and was extremely filthy.)

    What always sucked is 99% of the time when we did stay at one with a pool, I didn't have a bathing suit as we were heading for somewhere where there was no swimming!

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  2. Whether at motels or city pools, I think high diving boards (and a lot of low ones too) went away for liability reasons in the late 80s or so, to be replaced by the plastic slide. Oddly, even as society gets more and more litigious, our local municipal pool recently reinstalled the long-missing standard diving board, as well as the high board.

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  3. We rarely stayed at motels as a kid. I remember one trip from Wisconsin to New Jersey. We drove all day and all night. When we did stop at a motel, it was usually one of these no-name places. I always wanted to stay at a "fancy" place like a Holiday Inn.

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