Waits Motel

As medical students, during your surgical rotations, you learn the rules of surgery. They vary in number, and by institution, but the main ones are

1. sleep when you can
2. eat when you can
3. don’t make any changes after 4pm
4. never fuck with the pancreas

Since van life is very similar to surgery, we follow some of the same rules with slight modifications;

1. sleep where you can
2. eat where you can
3. don’t arrive after 4 pm (too dark)
4. never fuck with the pandemic

The rules became harder to apply as we moved north and the operative phrase was “closed for the season”. It was like we changed rotations and we were now doing a pathology rotation, because everything was cold and dead.

There were no campgrounds open for camping,  even the Walmart was not an option. With temperatures dipping below 30 we had to accept that Santiago was really just a metal tent. Sleeping in the van was not really the issue since we had made a quilt out of the excess wool insulation and that wooly mammoth beast of a blanket was beyond warm. The problem was where do you hang out once the sun goes down, which is like 4 pm. So then you go in the van and then are asleep by 7!   The temperature inside Santiago was maybe just a few degrees warmer then the outside. We did not even need to put the food in the Rtic to stay cool, so we now know the freezing point of sardines, dolmas and olive oil.

It came time to rotate out of our van life into hotel life, with its own protocols. But the transition out of van life did not necessarily lead to greater convenience or luxury. The need to recharge batteries decreased, but we still brought in the instapot, electric teapot (those hotel coffee makers are pretty gross) and tortilla maker.

 “Eat when you can” translated to waiting outside until the breakfast area was clear to dash in and “grab what you can” at the grab-n-go breakfast. 

“Sleep when you can” became “sleep where you can find outside corridors”. Not “fucking with the pandemic”, meant we restricted ourselves to hotels with outside corridors based on our daughter’s friend’s advice (important to listen when the friend is an infectious disease doctor/epidemiologist). Finding “motel” like places had gotten kind of hard. Maine had more due to the beaches but half of Maine was closed, so we essentially decided where to go based on where there were open, outside corridor hotels.  

Almost universally throughout our voyage, these motels were owned and operated by Indian immigrants. In 2015, 40% of motels in the US were owned by Indian immigrant families, and 70% of of these are owned by people who emigrated from the Guyarat area of India (West Coast of India). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/26/a-group-clamoring-for-opportunity-in-india-also-owns-40-percent-of-u-s-motels/

Three quarters of the owners are named Patel, since Patel is a common Guyarati surname. According to one article, some hotel industry people who noticed the predominance of this name in the hotel industry thought Patel meant hotel in Hindi.  (https://www.npr.org/2012/06/02/153988290/life-behind-the-lobby-indian-american-motel-owners)

We didn’t go in, but we did stop in the parking lot which for us counts as going in. https://chosenfugue.wordpress.com/2021/12/06/siteunseeing/

We did visit Winslow State Park, which gave us an introduction to the truly extraordinary and beautiful Maine coast.

Continuing north, we landed near Bar Harbor, ME eager to visit Acadia National Park.  https://www.nps.gov/acad/index.htm

Again, “closed for the season” was the rule for Maine.  The 10% of Acadia National park that was open was stunning.

Limited places to go and cold, cold wind meant more hotel time!  

Lured by another presidential link, we drove to the neighboring, NE cute (goes without saying) town of  Kennebunkport,  the summer home of the Bush family. Since everything here is super-close to each other, and since it was winter, we were able to drive to see the beaches of Ogunquit-Kennebunk-Kennebunkport-York-Wells-Kittery in less than half an afternoon. We probably could not have done that in the summer considering that 37 million people visited Maine in 2018 and the coastal route is along two-lane roads (just 1.3 million people live in Maine).

After 7 days in Maine, we traded the cold of Maine’s beautiful beaches for the cold of New Hampshire and Vermont. First, a quick stop in Portsmouth, NH just because we could. Like almost all other New England towns, we walked through the cute center and hit the highlights (exteriors only) within 45 minutes or less. Here, though we were left with some intriguing questions.

We drove through New Hampshire’s mountains, unaware that a bunch of snow had dumped the night before.  But roads were clear as we drove through a series of Christmas Cards.

We added another presidential badge for NH born Franklin Pierce, (the country’s 14th), but also one of our worst and least remembered. At least NH remembers him with an inordinate number of signs promoting their native son’s birthplace. https://www.nhstateparks.org/visit/historic-sites/franklin-pierce-homestead-historic-site We landed in Putney, VT, because it was only about an hour from Amherst (our eventual goal) and the only outside corridor hotel we could find open in the area.   Sure enough, our hotel in Putney, VT was on Patel Rd, and run by a Patel family.  We bundled up and went for our usual just-arrived walk about town. This consisted of walking the one block of the town until the dead end of the town- a cemetery. We realized more of the town was dead than alive, only about 455 people live there. 

We did add another college campus drive through-Landmark College, but mainly sat around wondering what the other 455 people could be doing.