Long Live Hotels

The hospitality, the grandeur, the escape.

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: staying somewhere that isn’t a home at all.

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AI Disclaimer

For this publication, I pledge to never use AI for the purposes of brainstorming, organizing, reorganizing, editing, cleaning up, rewording, writing, or generating anything other than what comes out of my own head and hands. Because of that, you will likely find plenty of errors and redundancies and grammatical mistakes. It may also run long because this is a first draft and I can’t self-edit for sh*t.

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Cherry Pie

As I’ve mentioned often in this publication, I spent a decade of my life working in a hotel. From the summer after high school all the way through college and the six years after that while home from tour, I was an employee of the Intercontinental Hotel Group, which owned the Holiday Inn in Grantville, Pennsylvania. I wrote about it recently in “Working on Christmas,” the irony of spending each holiday and holy day in a Holiday Inn.

Growing up, the Holiday Inn was the only respectable hotel for miles around. There were plenty of roadside motels, places left over before the state highway was built, before the Interstate split things open. Those places were the mainstays of transients– jockeys from the local race track, people who wanted to keep a low profile, or migrant families with ghost kids who rode your bus for a month then disappeared.

The Holiday Inn though– it wasn’t some pay-by-month place with a soda machine in a shed and a singular yellow street light illuminating a faded wooden sign. The Holiday Inn was classy. Or at least I thought so, in my limited experience of hotel life. My family didn’t travel much and we certainly didn’t have hotel money. We camped when we went places, a decision that was non-negotiable. In fact, I was 15 years old when I first slept in a hotel room, and that was for a youth group event.

When I was a kid, I lived down the road from my friend Chris whose family had a season pass to the Holiday Inn, granting them indoor and outdoor pool access and putting them on the Richie Rich tier of my social strata. What privilege! On the rare occasion I went with them as a guest, it felt like I made it. After all, our pool was a 2-foot-deep plastic liner with more algae than oxygen, all mixed in with grass cuttings that shot into it whenever my dad would push-mow around it. The Holiday Inn was magical. I was floored by the sunlight coming through the atrium, the sinking-into-blankets feeling of the hot tub, the sizzle of chlorinated water on the stones inside the locker room sauna. It felt unbelievably wealthy to me.

It stayed out of my reach until I landed a job there during the summers out of high school, which was great fortune since it was one of only about three places you could work in the town where I grew up.

You’d like to think a job is just a job, it’s the part of your life that is there to make money and then you leave and do real life on the evenings and weekends. But it’s so much more than that, especially when you work in a restaurant, inside of a hotel.

I went from a kid to a full-grown adult in that place, checking in for evening shifts in the summer and then all year round after college. Starting out in room service, I hustled food up and down elevators, sprinting down staircases during weekend rushes after the crowds came back from Hersheypark. I dropped food trays onto the desktops of all kinds of people– lonely businessmen, travel sports families, inner city ski trips with whole floors that reeked of weed (they’d also hire late-night strippers to perform in the ballrooms, an annual event that drove the line cooks wild). For me, the money was great, sometimes pulling in upwards of $200 for a 7-hour shift back in 2001.

Lifelong friends were made in that place. One time, a kid I worked with told me he moving to New York City after college, but he had a few weeks between quitting his job and going there. I told him we were going out on tour and he should just come along, so he did, and we made some incredible memories (he got to experience the pepper spray fight in Dallas and the loaded gun in the living room where we stayed that night, which I’m sure was a lifetime lowlight for him).

There were the coked-up cooks, especially Bruce, who was sweating always and absolutely lived for WTPA 93.5’s Friday night House of Hair, where he would quote every lyric to every ‘80s hair band song, except changing them to be completely perverted, including a revisionist version of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” which I cannot even print for fear of getting downranked by Google. Barback Jimmy had arms filled with jailhouse tattoos and would have nightly mental breakdowns accompanied by mild violence, which I’m sure had nothing to do with his having seven kids to five different women. He was literally just working to pay child support. There were the morning shift women who smelled like the inside of a tobacco barn and looked like the rear lot of the trailer park they lived in, who sexually harassed the innocent prayer-club high school busboys in ways that made them repent for sins they never did (for more on that, read Course 4 in “Just Keep Walking That Way”).

On Friday nights, we’d take advantage of the developmentally disabled prep cook by convincing him that the crab legs on the seafood buffet needed to be restocked 5 minutes before close, just so we could all crush them in the back server area.

That was the restaurant part, and mostly we stuck together. After shifts we’d go see someone’s jam band in a shed or sit around a backyard bonfire where we’d drink Yuengling until 3 a.m. Sometimes we’d play poker and lose all the money we made that night.

I’ve worked in other restaurants throughout my life, but there’s something different about working in a hotel. The most obvious thing is that everyone you meet is usually a traveler. And when you grow up in a small town, that opens your eyes. You hear about other places, you learn that New Yorkers are the worst customers but the best tippers, that Canadian are the best customers and the worst tippers, and truck drivers are on a totally different planet altogether.

The Latina women keep the housekeeping running, while their bitchy bosses go around and steal their tips off the dressers before they can get them.

There’s also something about wandering the place during the winter months, or on slow weekday nights. The long stretch of hallways, the secret closets to sit in when you needed a break, the smell of chlorine from the indoor pool when you went to hang out with your lifelong friend who would overdose on heroin a few years later.

During the busy times, the hotel feels so alive, full of lives interacting from all places and middle-class backgrounds. Fewer places feel more sad during the slow times, when the carpets don’t get replaced, the hot tub stays broken, and the parking lot yawns with empty spaces, allowing for the icy winds of winter to barrel through without a break.

It’s been years since I’ve been back (even though I buy my fireworks right across the street); the last time I was there, though, the bar manager remembered me. It was pretty empty on a Saturday afternoon at the Winner’s Circle Saloon, though I know it would pick up for line dancing and country music later that evening. The smell of cigarette smoke was long gone, the brass bar rails not quite as shiny as they once had been.

The beer though– it was still cold. He comped my drink, which I considered a badge of honor for almost a decade of service.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

The Main: Late-Night Room Service

Scrolling through social media (i.e. Substack), I came across this note:

First, I love the straightforward nature. The final call to action is direct and succinct, as it should be: Death to Airbnb.

As someone who has traveled far and wide for most of my adult life, who has spent time sleeping on the kitchen floors of strangers and sleeping bags in cargo vans, in both a tiny house (aka tool shed) in Delaware and a mansion on Airbnb, and both a crawlspace room in Hell’s Kitchen and a luxurious seaside multi-room suite in Venice, I have experienced the breadth of lodging. And I couldn’t agree more– Airbnb is another cog in the wheel of enshittification, and it deserves to be dead.

At the risk of sounding like an old codger banging a gavel in the woods that nobody will hear, who recently wrote about preferring the experience of department stores over the one-day delivery of Amazon, I feel like I should be clear that Airbnb does have its usefulness, at times.

When looking for group lodging, it can make sense. Hotels are an absurd proposition for more than four family members. But vacation homes have long existed, and there’s also VRBO or, I don’t know, just putting the dang property out there yourself and telling people to pay you straight up, since you want to play hotelier so badly. You want to charge a cleaning fee for opening your own house to strangers? No problem, but you can’t outsource it. Here’s a black and white dress and a feather duster. Get to work, because your body hair is in there too.

The real problem, as with all things technology has wrought, is what it Airbnb has taken.

There was a time when a hotel was a luxury, an escape, something you saved up for and spent on an annual vacation or reaped with the rewards of credit card points. It existed as the pinnacle of customer service. A friendly face at the front desk, greeting you with a smile and processing you quickly after a long drive or a transcontinental flight. Somebody making your bed every morning, and sometimes at night. The request of a toothbrush and the delivery of said item 10 minutes later. Food at your doorstep, and not in a clamshell foam container that just bounced around on the back of a moped for the past half hour, slowly dying a high-carb death in its own steam sauna.

Sure, there were problems. Cockroaches exist, ice machines break, the compressor in the AC unit rattles all night long. Those problems still exist.

But hotels maintain an aura, which houses do not. When you stay in someone’s house, you’re still staying in a house. There is nothing special about the majority of houses, even the ones with 12 rooms and an in-ground pool and a small-scale replica of Chuck-E-Cheese in the basement. They are still built to be homes. Everyone has experienced the inside of a house. When you travel, you should be homeless, or at the very least– unhoused.

What one does not experience in a home is a glass-ceilinged atrium with a fountain in the middle, or a 12-foot-wide window overlooking the city of Tokyo the whole way to Mt. Fuji, or the ability to take an emergency staircase three flights down to the bar where you can order an ice cold martini beside someone from Portugal. Where you stay should have a rooftop patio where the dark thoughts begin to take hold when you look down at the pavement. The elevator should delight you if it’s glass, and terrify you if it free falls. It should come with the feeling of getting somewhere after a long journey and not having to head straight to the grocery store, or navigating the bespoke rulebook for the house (fire pit is accessible, but don’t touch the wood pile, that’s for our own use!).

You just set your bags down and take advantage of the time in front of you.

It feels hypocritical to be writing this because I’m more of the “spend two days packing for a camping trip” type guy, who generally eschews hotel stays to the greatest extent possible. The frugal part of me thinks it’s insane to pay $300 a night to sleep somewhere, but the getting older part of me recognizes that time is money and vacation time is even more money. My wife is on the other side of the spectrum, appreciating the drawers and closet space and low-effort travel. She gets it.

However, I think there is a time and a place for everything. If you’re looking to go cheap, go camping, stay with a friend, whatever. If you’re looking to indulge and enjoy, stay in a hotel. I fully believe that hotels, when done right, can be one of the most memorable parts of a trip, in a way that I’ve never experienced from an Airbnb.

Two years ago, I traveled for work to run the Berlin Marathon. We were there with Adidas, who had booked us rooms at the Soho House, a very nice members’ club hotel in Berlin-Mitte. The building has a sordid history. A hundred years ago it was the home of an enormous, Jewish-owned department store, but was eventually relinquished to the Nazi party and used as the headquarters for the Hitler Youth. After the construction of the Berlin Wall, its location in East Berlin was appealing to Stalin, who made it the Communist Party’s Central Committee, rumored headquarters of the Stasi, and a location to “purge dissidents.”

After the Berlin wall fell, it was given back to the original Jewish family, who sold it later on. Today, it is the Soho House Berlin, where we stayed for the weekend of the Berlin Marathon. (Full transparency, it is not a budget hotel, with weekend rates running upwards of $700/night in October for a king bed. Duh, of course it was awesome.)

That much per night is insane to me, but I think I would pay that again to experience the room.

The hallway to my room

The place felt periodic specific, the hallway lined with armchairs and soft light coming from green-shaded lamps. When I turned the actual, physical key to my room, a replica old-school radio played a classical musical station as I pulled my suitcase across the dark wood floor. A warm lamp revealed the rest– a cocktail bar on the bureau and an espresso machine, a curated collection of books. The curtained windows opened to reveal a partial view of a courtyard and the street beyond. It was as cozy as anything I had experienced, aligning perfectly with the crisp fall weather outside the window panes. I immediately felt relaxed, as if everything was more simple. The night before the marathon was the best sleep I’ve ever had (the Unisom helped).

Whatever feeling I had that week, specifically in that room– I think about it all the time. It was a sadness mixed with a nostalgia mixed with a simplicity. I yearn to fall asleep in that room to classical music with the lights low. While running a personal best at the marathon was the highlight of my trip, and smoking post-race cigs on a bench by the Spree river that evening was the second best, I feel like the feeling I had from that room was the thing that sticks with me the most. It felt like a certain moment in my life, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to replicate it.

A great place to have a post-marathon cig on a fall evening

Similarly, staying in Tokyo was like traveling back in time to the golden age of hotels. The staff tending to your every need (and doing it with a smile), the full buffet breakfast (included in the price) with everything from fried chicken to an array of croissants and meats and cheeses. The attentiveness that goes beyond anything I’d ever experience in the U.S. One afternoon, I returned to find all my shoes organized neatly against the wall, something I’ve never done in my own house. It was unparalleled service, a gesture showing I was both welcome and appreciated, which allowed me to experience the city and the location in the best way. It’s weird to say I felt loved, but it’s kind of true.

Maybe I just miss good customer service, but that’s a topic for another time.

All I know is that without hotels, the Eagles would’ve canned Airbnb California, Wes Anderson would have struggled to film The Grand Budapest VRBO, Royal Tenenbaum would’ve been a squatter in a Brooklyn brownstone, a jet-lagged Bill Murray would have never met Scarlett Johansson in a Tokyo bar, and Kevin McAllister would still be lost/trafficked in New York.

So long live hotels.

Random hotel in Berlin

Course 3

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Two Weeks

Wow, this weekend was one to remember. Had some of my best old friends come into town to join up with some of my best new friends for the 2nd Annual Suppertime Summertime Supp meet-up here at my place in Baltimore. This is annual event open to all my paid subscribers, and I was so stoked that we doubled the attendance this year, coming in at 12 guests! It was a perfect Saturday summer evening here in Baltimore, with guests arriving around 6:00 and staying until midnight.

We ate crabs, drank some drinks, listened to music, and had some great conversation. Shout-out to Christina and Bora for coming from Arizona and Texas for the second year in a row, and to John Dizney, who made his way down from Connecticut. They’re also gift givers, so thanks to John for the baseball cards for my boys, and thank you to Christina and Bora for bringing books, especially this Larry McMurtry signed copy of Deadman’s Walk, the prequel to Lonesome Dove!

If you are a paid subscriber, you have an open invitation to next year’s event! Look for an announcement in April!

In case you missed it, I also launched my newest endeavor, Spun Out, a media company for men with a focus on reading and microadventures. Call it a redneck Reading Rainbow. My first adventure was finishing Lonesome Dove in a stolen car graveyard here in Baltimore, so you can check it out on Substack and on Youtube.

The most important part of the weekend, however, was my youngest son turning 8. That being Cal Ripken, Jr.’s number, it’s a pretty big deal in this Orioles household. He got a ton of Pokemon and baseball cards from friends and family, and we went to Dave & Buster’s for a couple hours in the afternoon before coming home and having a pizza party. We ended the day watching Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (the Japanese version with subtitles), because he loves Godzilla. I gotta find a way to get this kid to Japan. Maybe next year…

My kids also started their own weeding business (We Did It Weeding) a couple weeks ago, so we’ve been doing some manual labor in the evenings as well. They basically needed to earn more money since their snow shoveling slush funds have dried up.

That’s about it for this edition, thanks for reading and see you soon.

I also contribute to The Drop email, a weekly missive from Believe in the Run, where round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to past and current episodes anywhere you get your podcasts.

Ingredients List

Things I’ve been enjoying (or not) these past few weeks, in no particular order.

📖: “Theo of Golden” by Allen Levi // I finally finished this book and I have to say it’s probably the worst book I’ve ever read. DO NOT BUY INTO THE OPRAH HYPE. I REPEAT- DO NOT BUY IN. They were giving this away for free at my local library as part of their summer reading program, so I figured why not. It feels like a human version of AI, like The Notebook with fictional Precious Moments figurines as protagonists, like a Thomas Kincaid painting that accidentally turned into a book a la some weird Spiderman experiment. All written with the intent to be bought as a Hallmark special. I told myself I’d do better at finishing books and movies I didn’t like at first, and it’s possible I now regret that decision. I am genuinely floored at how many people liked this book (apologies to my mother-in-law).

📖: “Biking The Road That Oil Built” Salad Days by Cam Vigliotta // My friend Cam just set out on a transcontinental bike ride, starting way up at the top of Alaska. This is his first entry for the trip, and I really loved it for the nuance he saw in the things around him, which is something that happens when you go outside your comfort box and have hundreds of empty miles of road to think about. I love him for taking this huge swing on life and can’t wait to see where this journey takes him. You can also follow his journey on Instagram.

🎬 : Hotel Chevalier by Wes Anderson // I love Wes Anderson’s love for hotels and luggage and bellhops, so it’s only fitting that I rewatched this 7-minute short film, an addendum to the storyline of The Darjeeling Limited. It features Jason Schwartzman and a mostly naked Natalie Portman in her absolute prime– short-haired, post-Harvard, post-Garden State– the pin-up girl for hipster boys everywhere. What a time to be in love. (Free to watch on Youtube)

🎵 : “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely) by Peter Sarstedt // This is genuinely one of my favorite love songs of all time, and it’s played from front to back in the aforementioned Hotel Chevalier. It’s simple and charming waltz, with lyrics that reveal a wistful longing for a woman who’s part of the upper class. I think my favorite part is when he diverts the song for two lines to a quick observation about children in rags in the back alleys of Naples and then goes straight back to falling in love with a socialite. Which just sounds like something that a self-obsessed Wes Anderson character would do.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.