On the road again...

[chipotle]

Well, actually off the road now.

I'm at the Holiday Inn Express (what makes a hotel "express") at Jantzen Beach. I don't know if there's actually a beach here; this is a small island more or less on the edge of downtown Portland. It's the typical travel-oriented hotel rather than destination-oriented--no lobby to speak of, a free continental breakfast, an amiably generic room. But this is fine. It was probably the best night's sleep I've had since summer started.

The trip up the road yesterday could best be described as really long. I started around 9:00, a little later than I should have. Thanks to traffic and a longer-than-desired detour around Union City (when CalTrans says "Freeway →" sometimes they leave off the "...eventually"), I wasn't out of the bay area until nearly noon. Lunch was at Granzella's Deli in the small town of Williams, California--then it was on along I-5, with an inevitable detour to Shasta Dam.

I made it into Oregon around five, I think; I stopped in another middle-of-nowhere place at a restaurant called "Heaven on Earth" for dinner, a country restaurant so aggressively Christian it was either charming or disturbing depending on how you wanted to look at it.

My first--and so far only--view of Portland was coming into the city after 10:30 and watching the skyline. It was one of the prettiest views of a city I've had.

In about a half-hour shaterri should be here and we'll do... something. Get breakfast, more than likely. (I braved the in-room coffee maker, and I'm willing to say it's some of the best free hotel coffee I've had, but that only goes so far.) It looks like today will be overcast and drizzly, but things should clear up tomorrow. And, naturally, I managed to forget a couple things I'll have to go shopping for--but it looks like I'm on Strip Mall Island here, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Comments

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I would guess 'express' = 'fewer pesky services and amenities to eat up your valuable driving time'

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's the idea -- the HI Expresses are following a similar model to Microtel, Fairfield and a lot of other "traveller-oriented" places: no convention facilities (at best a small meeting room or two), no restaurant or room service but always a free continental breakfast, and usually pretty well-kept and well-appointed rooms for the price (in addition to the inevitable coffeepot, this one has a reasonably-sized bar refrigerator and a microwave, and of course free internet).

The thing that's weird to me, though, is the marketing -- Holiday Inn's roots are, well, precisely this kind of traveller-oriented motel. There's always been the occasional big resort-like Holiday Inn, but they started as spots for interstate travellers; the full high-end HIs have had the Crowne Plaza branding available for (at least) a couple decades.

My guess is that the current owners feel that the original brand slid, which it might well have. The last Holiday Inn I remember staying in, many years ago, was positively decrepit. The HI Express here may be character-free, but sometimes that's an improvement. And I give them a couple points for actually having a complimentary local paper rather than USA Today.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

*shrug* I guess their public image changed to Holiday Inn being a home base for tourists, so that going back to the travel-stop concept is 'new.' There is no history in marketing, of course, even if there's plenty of nostalgia.

I suppose the uneven branding could be attributed to the whims of whoever physically owns the buildings.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

A case in point: today I saw a box of Lucky Charms with the legend "New Green Clover Marshmallows." New? The green clover was one of the original four marshmallow types, before Lucky Charms mutated. It's new only because they say it's new.