Last night after I had posted my blog I had a long talk with the man who owned the motel. He had an interesting story.
STORY 1: He's and electrican and had work in the area and stayed at the motel for weeks. The woman who used to own it told them she was going to have to shut it down for a while and the man's wife volunteered to run the motel for free rent. Then the man got laid off. Finally the bank came in and took over the motel. When they found out about the arrangement, they asked them to keep running it for them...with pay. They have been doing it for a couple of years and are now planning to buy it.
STORY 2: He has worked in Williston, ND...the boom town. He could make $100K for 6 months work. He said that Walmart finally had to forbid workers from sleeping in the cars in the parking lot. But the best story was the 19 year old kid who bought one of the many semi-trailors littering the landscape, rented some land, installed 20 showers and charged $10 a piece for a shower and he didn't even supply soap or towels. It had a line 24 hours a day, so be bought another, then another. Now he owns 8. That's 8 trailers, 20 showers each at $20 (2 showers per each hour), for 24 hours. You do the math.
I like the guy so much I asked him if I could tag his fence.
Staying in big chain motels you hardly ever hear any stories worth repeating. Here is the "home" of an old woman. She lives in the last unit where we stayed a couple of days ago. When the Indian couple bought the motel, she was already living there. The couple let her stay and now their three children call her grandmother.
Nice story, that.
We jumped on Highway 2 West and it was nice...
In case you are interested...
No matter how small the highway, this depressing shit happens every once in a while...
But you also find surprises like this...
They completely build the log cabin at their facility then code the pieces and ship it to the site.
But on most of the back roads, this is entirely true...
Had to spend too much time on the road looking for a motel that wasn't full. Don't have time to write more. Deal with it.
So, just like cigarettes, let's ban them.
Crank up AC/DC's "Highway To Hell" while watching this...
People want this key added...it will mean "the"...I like it.
WWI trenches...British on the left, German on the right...
I see what you did there...
When someone tells me that they can outdrink me...
2 comments:
wrt that hideous signage and roadside architecture: have I ever suggested that you watch this talk by James Howard Kunstler? If you get 20 minutes or so, I think you might like it (and I figure we'd agree about most of what he had to say).
http://youtu.be/Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
You can read the transcript of the thing at the TED webpage for the talk. I'll just quote some choice bits from the intro:
"The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible. We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this. And mostly, I want to persuade you that we have to do better if we're going to continue the project of civilization in America."
And referring to a horrendous image just like the one you decried:
"There are a lot of ways you can describe this. You know, I like to call it the national automobile slum. You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. You can call it a technosis externality clusterfuck. And it's a tremendous problem for us. The salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not worth caring about. We're going to talk about that some more. A sense of place: your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are."
The guy's kind of crazy, but in my opinion he's the good kind of crazy. And that talk was spot-on.
That John Cleese GIF is great. Helluva brow on that dude, lol.
Matt, we drove up to Escanaba to hook up with Hwy 2 on the UP, then straight across to Wisconsin, where we took hwy 35 around the loop north on the water.
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