Moving Home Interstate – Some Problems That May Occur

Moving your home over a great distance of more than one days’ travel makes it necessary to stop over for the night somewhere. And that’s the twilight zone of residency: the hotel town. The little rest stop village that exists for no other reason than to be a way-station between Point A and Point B. It’s impossible to miss; it’s the one with the U-Haul and Ryder trucks next to it.

After you’re seen enough hotel towns, they all tend to blend together. Do they, in fact, exist in the same dimension as the rest of the world? Do they fade back into the ether as soon as they vanish from our rear-view mirror the next morning? All of them have such a transient atmosphere, you have to wonder about the kind of people who stay there for life. Did they find it too hard to survive in the real world? Are they hermits or drop-outs? Were they born and raised there?

Sometimes the hotel town goes on for so long like this, it becomes a ghost of itself. Take “Primm”, otherwise known as “Stateline”, a town straddling the border of Nevada and California in the United States. It is as halfway to anywhere as you can get. You can stand in Primm and look away along the I-15 in either direction and see it stretch out across nothing at all, an endless limbo of desert. There in Primm, you have the minimum number of each type of business required to make it a viable town. The stench of failure makes visible waves rise off the city that are visible from the farther crest of the mountains. Nobody is in Primm because they wanted to be; everybody is there because they couldn’t make it in Las Vegas.

You pull into this moldering graveyard in your rented truck towing your car, having carefully dodged every speed trap on the way in. The wife and kids are apprehensive; they want this to be an overnight vacation, a fun place, but everything looks good until you get up close to it and you smell the mildew and rust, and see the apathetic, laconic employees who shy away from being put to work like a vampire avoiding garlic. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. There’s a pool! Oh, it’s closed. Look, a roller coaster! On second thought, it doesn’t look like it can hold itself up, let alone me. Well, here’s a coffee shop. Ah, do you see anybody working here?

You are able to acquire boarding for the night, though, and so you get your allotted space on the fourth floor, where the only window is facing the wall of the hotel next door. There is the faded, utterly characterless room with the air conditioner that smells funny, the carpet that is suspiciously off-color, the fuzzy color TV at the foot of the bed, the lumpy mattress that you flip over to make sure there isn’t a dead hooker hidden in the box-springs, the plastic bucket for the ice machine that every single hotel has for some unknown reason, the no-name brand bottles of shampoo and bars of soap. You can go downstairs to the casino floor, but there’s almost nothing but fruit machines and video poker down there. And even the machines look like they don’t come to Primm until they break down in Vegas and get refurbished here. The employees are the walking dead.

How better is the heartland hotel town, where at least the place seems to have some other reason to exist besides being a tourist trap. There’s farms around there. Another town or two is close to the area, so at least the natives look like they’ve had verifiable fun on at least one occasion in their lives. When you get a quaint little cottage inn with a restaurant attached and a perky staff and some actual sight-seeing around the area, you feel like you’re in special luck.

Sometimes you even feel like staying for an extra day. This is the perfect remedy for the crabbiness that inevitably sets in when the whole family has been on the road for a few days crammed into the front of the moving truck. There’s bruises in your sides from each other’s elbows, your legs feel permanently cramped, and you’re just ready for a meal, any meal, as long as it’s on a plate and is to be eaten with a knife and fork with sitting at a table. There’s only so long you can exist on little bags you get through the window.

Staying for an extra day at a motel town that’s actually worth staying at is best handled by having the tiredest person stay inside for a day of TV-watching in bed, while everybody else gets out and walks a tour of the town for the day, splitting up into the smallest possible groups. That way everybody gets a break from each other as well, which is a blessing when you spend three days at a time crammed next to them on the road.