One more from Sonoma

Petaluma, CA, June 2008

Of Cheap Motels and Family Idylls

San Luis Obispo, CA:

American as Eskimo Pie

When I first landed in San Luis Obispo this spring, I felt I’d somehow traveled back in time about 35 years, to vacations I’d taken when growing up on the East Coast. In the late 60s and early 70s, my family ventured out to nearby upstate NY and PA, and stayed in small motels, where yellow signs boasted “Color TV,” a Fresca machine sat proudly behind the motel office, reservations were recorded with Bic pens on index cards, and a cool stream seemed set to perpetually burble right next to the property. (And people even used words like “burbling” to describe it.) And while I’d never classify my childhood as “simple,” these were undoubtedly simpler times than now, when mom and dad are each grinding away on separate cell phones with laptops glued to their bodies, and kids seem to be suckled on iPods and Playstations instead of games where they get to interact with other humans and run around outside screaming.

Does anybody else feel sadness when watching these Age of Distraction families? I can’t imagine children being sustained on this dearth of attention any more than I can envision a tree and bearing fruit while listening to Linkin Park on earbuds. Is this terribly old-fashioned of me? Of course, kids adore things like iPods and Playstations…in the same ways they love other things that are great for them, like Pop Rocks and Kool-Aid. But some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around the times I spent with my grandma and grandpa, when it seemed their whole raison d’etre was having a good game of checkers with me. I suspect that I am not alone in this…And yet, why is it that we’re all so hermetically sealed behind our electronic devices that we allow the human factor to creep in less and less? As Carrie Bradshaw might inquire, Does your creeping in creep me out?

And so it was, tired and alienated and very much feeling the scars of having lived 16 years too long in NM, a place that drove me to my knees, to put it gently...that I landed in SLO after believing I was moving to LA. (That’s another entry for another time.) From the moment I set foot in San Luis, I knew I had discovered a place that was of another era. It was probably the most wholesome, small-town-American enclave I’d ever been in. It practically screamed, “Good Clean Fun!” As I walked around, my mind drifted to one of my favorite old Sean Penn films, Racing with the Moon. If you want to watch an utterly sweet, impending-loss-of-innocence movie some night, you gotta see Sean and Nic Cage (and a very young Elizabeth McGovern) in Racing with the Moon. (It was actually filmed quite a bit north, in Mendocino, but close enough.)

One of the things that first struck me as utterly anachronistic was the lack of chain stores. OK, it turns out there are some, but they are neatly tucked away and certainly, the town rallies against them in favor of local business. They even successfully drove Taco Bell off one of the main drags. A clear case of “Yo no quiero.” Then there was the low-tech aspect. On Monterey, another of the main streets, sit an electrical appliance fix-it store, a stamp and coin shop, and a lock-and-key, all blissfully unharmed by the wheels of more-modern commerce. Indie bookshops that have not been run off by Barnes and Noble or Borders. Four locally owned frozen yogurt stores. Auto lots that sell used Lotuses and ’67 Chevys. An old-fashioned barber, complete with swirly pole. Hey, didn’t they get the memo that in America 2008, you just can’t set up a town with businesses owned by real people??

Another uniquely American touch here: SLO is the home of the first motor hotel, or mo-tel, built in 1925, just when Americans began to have the resources to make road trips, and a stop squarely between San Fran and LA had broad appeal. 

In fact, this is the exterior of that very first motorists’ hotel, the Motel Inn, which is supposedly being restored by the hotelier next to it, though I have a sense that it may end up on the scrap heap. Which probably would have pleased J. Edgar Hoover, as he thought motels the true hotbeds o' Communism. But even Crazy J. Eddie would have agreed that it's a bit of a tease to see the lovely façade from the road, then drive up to a withering pile of Tyvek.

Anyway, after spending a couple nights at another budget motel, the Travelodge, I stumbled onto the Peachtree Inn, which Margot dubbed “the Beachtree,” probably because it had been so long since she’d seen a beach. Although at first glance I thought I was simply checking into another El Cheapo, I quickly realized that, again, I had stepped back into another time warp. The entirely-too-civil owner handed me several large gold room keys (no plastic cards!) and gave me my choice of rooms built around a lovely courtyard. From a giant eucalyptus tree was suspended a large swing. On another patch of green grass were 3 Adirondack chairs in which families routinely relaxed and, get this, read books! In fact, the only person I ever saw in one of those chairs with an electronic device was me…

You could sit literally for hours in those chairs, which believe me I did ‘cause I was Kentucky-fried, and stare off into the mountains, read a book, nibble on the cookies and pretzels that were left out in the kitchen ALL DAY LONG, and simply ponder your fate. I felt like I was 10 again, and vacationing at the lake with my parents. Except no one was fighting and I wasn’t getting pushed into freezing cold water and tossed into a canoe that leaked.

Every morning I would get up and go to the breakfast room, where they had bad-for-you cereals that my Whole Foods-inured palate hadn’t seen in years, like Honey-Nut Cheerios, which I’m betting no bee or real almond ever got near. There I would actually talk with the motel staff and guests. You could eat inside, where a radio station played songs Pet Clark never even remembered recording, or go outside on the back deck and appreciate the ever-temperate weather and revel in this kind of spring-morning, good-to-be-alive feeling. I was rabidly content.

After breakfast, I would walk into town, always taking a different route, discovering the small shops, Victorian homes, railroad tracks, and creek that flowed through the center. People proved generally in a fine mood here, and would smile or say hello as I passed them on the street. (I have to say, I’ve never met so many nice people in all my life. Just purely nice, for the sake of being nice—no attitude, no edge, no resentments, no angst. Definitely not from NYC.) If you can avoid comparing your age with that of the students—who actually seem less self-absorbed than their peers in many cases—you can generally feel quite swell here. And you wouldn’t want to be feeling anything other than swell. Unless you were going surfing, in which case you’d be feeling stoked. And if you weren’t feeling stoked, you’d probably be… down the road about 3 hours, sitting in traffic in LA.