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Surely I’m not the only traveller who, when driving around the USA, spends most of the time staring out the car window on the lookout for cool, old motels – bonus points for an impressive sign. Whizzing along the PCH through California’s Central Coast on a wet, grey November early evening years ago, I’ll never forget the first time I spotted the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, its unmistakable flickering Barbie-pink neon sign towering above the highway against the San Luis Obispo mountains. “We have to turn around,” I announced to my now husband with anxious enthusiasm. “Now!” Pulling into the giant car park, I remember feeling impatient for a close-up look, I opened the car window and stuck my head into the drizzle to absorb the dazzling details: the cute horse and carriage flashing yellow, red and blue, the allure of illuminated words: ‘Vacancy’, ‘Cocktails’, ‘Copper Café’, ‘Pastries’, ‘Steak House’. It was – and still is – a head-turning advert fit for the sprawling, stone-clad, 110-room beacon of kitsch hospitality this former 12-room curbside lodge has become since it opened in 1958 by construction magnate Alex Madonna. Setting foot inside its fairytale-like Swiss Alpine-style wood-carved lobby was just as thrilling as catching sight of the sign, I just knew I had to spend the night there. It was 2001 and I was on my first USA road trip, a three-week adventure around Arizona, Nevada and California, one I could only afford by staying in budget motels. The Madonna Inn, now with a cult following and famous for its shiveringly sweet pink champagne cake, was not the cheapest, but certainly my first noteworthy motel encounter. That night, over a Madonna Rum Punch in the Silver Bar Cocktail Lounge, it struck me that these roadside sanctuaries, some less assuming than others, are more than cheap places to sleep. They are the connective tissue of American travel, and vital part of the national landscape. Culturally, motels are both ordinary and cinematic. They’ve been immortalised in songs, films, and novels, from Psycho’s eerie Bates Motel to the poetic melancholy of Edward Hopper’s paintings. They’ve hosted elopements and fugitives, salesmen and poets, families and loners, every room a stage where hundreds of small, anonymous stories unfold. Read more: 8 incredible California road trips Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Madonna Inn is in the same city as the world’s first motel – nowadays, only a few walls remain. The Milestone Mo-Tel opened in 1925 alongside the rise of car culture by Chicagoan architect, Arthur Heineman, who accidentally coined the term ‘motel’ in the process when he discovered the nine-letter ‘Milestone Motor Hotel’ name was too long for his rooftop sign, apparently. The motel offered a new kind of freedom – a bed, a shower, and a parking space right outside your door. Just you, your car, and the open road. By the 1950s and 60s, during the golden age of postwar prosperity, motels became symbols of modern convenience and optimism, with over 60,000 dotted along the country’s roads. Neon signs lit up highways like constellations; families piled into station wagons with picnic baskets and road maps, trusting that somewhere ahead there would always be a vacancy. By the 1970s and 80s, however, after air travel took off and the Interstate Highway System was built diverted drivers away from these ubiquitous roadside gems, so many had become either abandoned, demolished or seedy settings for crime. Fast forward a hundred years and America’s historic motels are witnessing a renaissance, a trend that began a decade ago and shows no signs of slowing, many having been beautifully restored with respect for their heritage – 40 of the best featuring in my book, Vintage Motels. To me, what makes these motels special is originality; my favourites carrying the fingerprints of their owners and their geography, like the flamboyant Madonna Inn, of course, whose owners wanted guests to feel both comfortable and wowed from the moment they walked through the door; Silver Sands, a beautifully intentionally reimagined modern waterfront retreat, perched on the tip of Long Island’s laid-back North Fork that whisks you to the late 1950s; the retro-styled Blue Swallow Motel built in 1939 said to be one of the best preserved and longest continuously operating, independently owned and family-run motels on Route 66; the Ojai Rancho Inn, a former 1950s motel in Ojai, a magnet for bohemians that offers a playful nod to Ojai’s reputation as a spiritual vortex; and the historic El Rancho Hotel on old Route 66 in New Mexico, once a hub for the Hollywood film industry, most of them having lured me off the road with their cool, sometime neon signage, of course. Vintage Motels - America’s Most Inspiring Motels, Beautifully Restored by Ellie Seymour is published by Luster Publishing, £35, accartbooks.com
