Blatherings From The Editor

Reservations

(April 2006) 

There are two kinds of planners – those that do and those that don’t.  Somewhere I read that a young rider plans a route and leaves; the older rider leaves and lets the route unfold.  Although I’m not young any more, I’m a planner, got the map program, all kinds of hotel/motel links and enough paper maps to cover the walls of a small house.

     Which camp you’re in kind of depends on your risk factor and how late you had to ride one night when you didn’t make any reservations.  It was like half past eight in the evening, we’d been on the road close to fourteen hours, and there wasn’t a hotel room to be had in any direction.  I don’t want to ever again have to knock on the kitchen door of a closed restaurant asking the Hispanic help where I could find a place to stay.  A bummer, although I did learn a bit of Spanish figuring out I was being told there was a bed and breakfast down the street.

     Boy have we bombed on occasion making reservations at an unknown location.  We got a great little motel room on Van Buren in Phoenix that will forever remain in our memories as the Bates Motel for the Ladies of the Evening.  Gun shots, sirens, and what sounded like plain mayhem went on most of the night.  Later we were told by a friend that we spent the night in the heart of Phoenix’s Red Light District, a really busy Red Light District.

     Don Cameron and I stayed in Indio, CA in one of the deadliest Motel 6’s known to man or beast.  The stop-n-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic in the parking lot at close to midnight was a warning.  The cashier was behind bars.  After checking into our room, we weren’t sure we would ever see our bikes again.  You heard our sigh of relief when we got up the next morning and they were still there.  Fear the Motel 6 in Indio, I do.

     The Space Age Lodge in Gila Bend is a nice place to throw down for the night.  Clean sheets, a restaurant on the premises and a train going by every twenty minutes starting right after sundown.  You could spit on the railroad tracks out our bathroom window.  The bed vibrated and we didn’t even have to put in any quarters.  It was like sleeping in a box car.  Woo-hoo!

     Once in a while we do hit pay dirt.  These are the ones that go into the little black book, actually the hand held, for future reference.  The hot tub at the La Siesta in Ajo is soooo good after a long day in the saddle, and it doesn’t cost a month’s rent to spend the night there, either.  The San Juan Inn in Mexican Hat, UT was super!  The Quartzsite Yacht Club Motel with the Quartzsite Yacht Club dining experience is a hoot, too.

     We motorcyclists must enjoy some risk, otherwise why would we ride?  The risk of getting a bad hotel or motel room for the night though is just too much to risk.  I keep notes and make reservations, I wouldn’t think of leaving home without 'em.  Deryle Mehrten, always reserved.