Pink Slip: What a terrific hobby!

My family didn't do a lot of traveling when I was a growing up.

Summer vacation meant a) going to Chicago, or b) renting a cottage (owned by Mae and Nemo, friends of my parents) on the Cape, or c) day trips.

The only one of these options that required overnight accommodation was a) going to Chicago if the mode of transportation was driving vs. the train.

I remember two driving trips.

My main memory of the one when I was four was starting out at dawn, with my sister and I stretched out on the back seat, covered with a pink blanket to catch vomit if either of us got carsick. I don't recall whether either of us got carsick, but it was certainly a possibility. I remember we stopped for our lunch break, eating in a little park near Syracuse, where we got to play on the swings, which were sit-in swings, rather than the sit-on swings I was used to. So exotic! I also liked the name "Syracuse," which also stuck with me.

I have no memory of where we stayed, but I'm guessing some little road side motel, maybe with cabins.

This would have been in 1954, before the interstate highway system was built. My father - the one and only driver, as my mother didn't get her license until I was in high school - would have taken Route 9 and equivalents all the way, and the trip may well have involved two overnights in some roadside "motor lodge."

In 1963, "we" - where "we" was my father, and the Big Three (me, my sister Kath, and my brother Tom) - drove to Chicago, while my mother flew with the Little Two (Rick and Trish). We stayed at a Holiday Inn in one diretion, and a Howard Johnson in the other. One of the stops was in Erie, Pennsylvnia, the other in Ashtabula, Ohio. I don't recall which was which.

I found the experience ultra exciting. Eating in a restaurant! Cheese Danish! Motel with pool! Those little soaps in the bathroom! It was just beyond.

I've done a ton of travel since back in the day, but, alas, it rarely involved "the motor lodges and small mom-and-pop hotels that once dotted roadside America." Instead, it was almost all camping and hosteling (young folk travel) and hotels or VRBO-types in big cities (grown up business and pleasure travel). When my friend Joyce and I drove cross country, we stayed at a couple of "motor lodges" when we just felt we needed to have a roof over our heads, rather than a tent fly. This seldom happened, but over the course of a couple of months it did occur once or twice.

My husband and I used to spend a long weekend in Perkin's Cove (Ogunquit), Maine every year, and stayed at the Riverside Motel, which was kind of nondescript, but location, location, location...It was right on an active lobster fishing cove, and the cove was small but had quite a few very good restaurants. One thing I do remember is that the Riverside served a continental breakfast, with OJ provided in tiny white ruffled cups not much larger than a thimble. The place is still in business, but it's now swanked up and reworked as Auberge on the Cove. (Now on my bucket list, btw.)

But E. Hussa did stay in plenty of those roadside America spots "during bucolic childhood summers spent in New England" a few decades ago.

She described one motel in particular, the American Motor Lodge in Sturbridge, as her childhood happy place. Her family visited OId Sturbridge Village and stayed at the 55-room inn on Route 20 (touted as just 1,000 yards from the Massachusetts Turnpike!). They swam in the indoor heated pool and enjoyed meals in the restaurant.

“One day, we were driving through Sturbridge, maybe 15 years ago, and I realized, ‘Oh my God, the American Motor Lodge is abandoned.’ This place that was the source of so many great memories was gone. It had an impact on me,” Hussa said. “That’s when I really started seeing it. There are so many abandoned old motels. I realized this is something that I could actually research and document in some way.” (Source: Boston Globe)

And so E. Hussa went about that research and documenting, which turned into her website, Dead Motels USA, which she started in 2018. And which is just a treasure trove of wonder. Just awesome. What right-minded kid of the 1950's wouldn't have wanted to spend a night or two in the Teddy Bear Motel in Cherokee, NC. Nobody I ever knew, that's for sure.

Or a motel with a pool shaped like a cowboy boot, a heart, a kitty cat? (Hard pass on the one with the clown-shaped pool.)

She has expanded her reach with an Instagram account which now has almost 200,000 followers. She also does dead and abandoned drive-in restaurants, and an occasional abandoned gas station. Bet she adds drive-in movie theaters at some point...

E. Hussa wants to retain her anonymity.

She's not looking to make a profit from her work. It’s simply an all-consuming hobby. She also rarely grants interviews, preferring that her website and Instagram account tell the sad stories of the rise and decline of the roadside inn.

“It’s just more fun for me to separate my real life from this almost fantasy hobby,” she said. “And nobody ever has to know who I am.”

There's a coffee table book in there somewhere, but so far she just hasn't "felt moved or compelled to do it. So, maybe in the future."

And I wouldn't be moved or compelled to buy it. I'm happy just to comb through her website and come across gems like this Niagara Falls Hilton honeymoon suite from the 1970s.