We traveled a lot when I was a kid. We took all-day trips to Iowa and central Texas from northeast Oklahoma every year to visit my two sets of grandparents. Those trips didn't involve motel stays, but we stayed in a myriad of them on other, less time-intensive treks.
My dad was old-school Norwegian stock from Minnesota. That meant dollars didn't fly out of his wallet. He looked for the best value for the buck. And, quite often, that meant staying in a clean motel with no place for a kid to swim.
But, not too rarely, he would splurge an extra five bucks a night and give me the ultimate thrill: staying in a motel that HAD A POOL!
I have been able to relate very closely to my father's quandaries as I have reached middle age. For instance, the idea of getting a good cheap motel that looked squeaky clean as opposed to a more expensive chain franchise that came complete with a pool for the kids was always very tempting. But then I would remember the unbridled joy that I would exude when dad would pull into a motel parking lot that had within its expanse a gorgeous, blue, sparkling-in-the-sunlight swimming pool.
Another way I can relate to dad is in not giving a whit whether a motel has a pool or not. Out of the last 100 hotel/motels I've stayed in that had pools (in other words, that had been built since 1980), I actually swam in perhaps five of them. I was too tired from traveling to consider suiting up and jumping in.
But kids who have been sleeping in the back seat all day long are another matter. And when my kids were small, that meant dragging my tired bones down to the pool to watch them.
That's okay. It was easy work.
In my childhood, I became quite adept at turning flips and such from motel diving boards. I was a natural swimmer, so the eight-foot-depths were no sweat to me.
Nowadays, of course, we live in litigious times that insist that pools be idiot-proof. That means the shallow concrete reservoirs are suitable for little else but floating around upon on an air mattress.
But we Boomer kids can remember when our fathers' pulling into a motel parking lot that also housed a pool meant that we were in for an unbridled afternoon full of joy jumping off a board and eventually getting ourselves as tired as our traveled-out parents.
Comments (6)
What a great memory! Do we have the same dad?! :)
Posted by Rhonda | July 23, 2007 6:21 AM
Posted on July 23, 2007 06:21
I miss high dives....not that I would go on them again, but so kids can experience the same thrill of looking down
20+ feet, and finally taking that great leap for the first time. Now,
no nothing, even a low board. I guess kids are so out of shape now they
prob couldn't hack the boards anyway. That is, If you could even pull them away from the Playstation. Sad to say, I think kids would be more excited today if a hotel had a Playstation 3 and 50 games to play in the room.....how times have changed!!!!!!
My memories of hotel pools on vacation were around wisconsin dells in the early 70's....they were just postage stamp pools, but
we loved 'em. Miniature golf was the other fun thing we did. We stayed
at a place that had a mini-golf course a few blocks down, and I felt like a big shot at 9 being able to walk there
myself. Remember when everything was Pinball?
I hate to say it, but sometimes it was just exciting to us if the place we were staying at had a pinball machine. Sometimes, in Wisconsin, they were actually inside the bar, but we would go in anyway, crank up the jukebox(another post in itself....how cool it was at 5-6 years old to pick out songs on the jukebox for the first
time? I still remember at 5 playing my first song, and watching the arm grab the 45 and plop it on the platter...), and just bliss out...a bag of potato chips, coke, and
a chocolate bar completed the bliss while you were trying to win a free game...
Finally, I finally appreciate my folks taking us on those family trips, which surely bored them in many ways, just to make us happy. I think they took just one trip themselves in all those years, to the Bahamas.
Now parents are too busy
to even cook dinner....
we had it far better than we realized......
and I strongly feel childhood was at its zenith between the mid 50's and the mid 70's...
it was more innocent,
fathers had good sole-supporting jobs, and
Mom was home with all that entails...even TV was way more centered on KIDS...I know there are lots of kids cable channels now, but it was different when the local channels had local kids shows..way more real and intimate,
and you could even be on TV yourself(re: Howdy Doody, Bozo's Circus).
Posted by scott | July 23, 2007 4:23 PM
Posted on July 23, 2007 16:23
You are right on with this one! It was a big thrill when we stayed at a motel with pool, particularly for me, since I fancied myself a budding "Mike Nelson" of "Sea Hunt".
I have a collection of motel postcards from Tulsa on my site, and a "Sea Hunt" memory, too.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tulsatv/sets/
http://tulsatvmemories.com/pop.html
Posted by Mike Ransom | July 24, 2007 9:08 AM
Posted on July 24, 2007 09:08
Ron, where is your dad from in Minnesota? I have relative up in North Minnesota.
I remember the motel swimming pools. In Florida, we had to have a motel with a swimming pool. Dad loved the swimming pools. In fact, I learned to swim in a motel swimming pool near Cypress Gardens, Florida. It was a neat time when their was a diving board. Most of our travels were to the south. Swimming pools were pretty common. Didn't have any when we went to Expo 68 Montreal! Instead, we swam in the cold Saint Lawrence near Trios Riveries.
Posted by Rivers End | June 26, 2009 7:06 PM
Posted on June 26, 2009 19:06
River's End, it was a tiny community called Moscow. I'm pretty sure it no longer exists, and I only went there once as a child, and couldn't even tell you where in MN it's located!
Posted by Ron | June 27, 2009 6:58 AM
Posted on June 27, 2009 06:58
When I was a kid, the swimming pool was always the major part of the holiday. An amazing pool meant an amazing holiday but as an adult, I don't value it anywhere near as much as when I was a child.
Posted by Baby Sleeping Bag | September 1, 2010 7:54 AM
Posted on September 1, 2010 07:54