Hotel Life
Angular Views on ... Simple Living
Living Small in an Age of Large
Room 5 on ground floor of Las Vegas residential hotel was home for two years to author and his wife
The Joy of Check-in
Every time I pass a hotel, I want to check in. Maybe for a night, maybe for a week. Possibly a month.
Sometimes, a full year of residence sounds irresistible.
Not just fancy hotels, either. Nor nostalgic mom-and-pop motels along nearly-deserted old highways, though they nearly always promise – and often deliver – especially unforgettable delights. Or in some cases, disturbances.
No, even the sight of a familiar Comfort Inn or a Hyatt alongside the Interstate, or a decaying dowager within the depths of downtown, instantly triggers an urge to step up to the check-in desk.
Most people – most Americans, at least – seem to crave a big, luxurious home on a spacious lot. You know the kind, complete with a car or two in the garage, and perhaps another posing in the driveway. That’s what we’re all expected to strive for, to covet, to be unhappy about if we don’t attain it. Two or 2.5 baths, a bedroom for each kid, patio and carport waiting.
Me, I just want a hotel room: possibly with some semblance of room service available for special occasions, but more likely a passable cafe down the street. If a window faces the outside world, noisy streets or not, all the better. TV and wi-fi are welcome, but not always mandatory. One bed, two beds, king or single. Doesn’t matter a bit. Private bath would be nice, but a facility down the hall has sufficed at times.
No doubt, my favorable attitude toward hotels and SROs (single room occupancy residences) stems from the fact that I used to live in hotels. Cheap ones. At one time, long ago, I also enjoyed a short stint as a night clerk in a Chicago hostelry that catered largely to long-term residents. Later on, I spent a year in that very same hotel, in a room little bigger than the single bed, with a share-bath across the corridor. No TV for amusement, but the single window opened onto an intriguing segment of Chicago’s entertainment district. Especially at night, there was plenty to see down on North State Street, without even leaving the room.
A couple of years later, I occupied a terrific corner room in another weekly-rate hotel with a view of Chicago’s Lincoln Park out one window (if you stretched your neck a little), and the active Old Town neighborhood facing the other window. Second floor, right above the restaurant. Plenty of people living in that area were paying three, four, five times as much as I was in rent, because they had conventional, sizable apartments. This time, for more than a year, I enjoyed the lavish comfort of a private bath and even shelled out a few dollars extra each week to rent a TV set. This was living.
Even during our early years of marriage, my wife and I lived for a while in a hotel. In Las Vegas, of all places. Not one of those tacky high-rise monstrosities you see on the glittery Strip, either. No, this was a little residential place right downtown, a block off Fremont Street. Weekly Rates, Private Bath, Cable TV with a black-and-white set, no less. This was the early ‘80s, after all, when cable was something new and little-known. Everything a person should need, don’t you think?
Air conditioning? Not included, but what was known as a “swamp cooler” helped a bit when the outside air approached 110 degrees. Expecting a phone call? The manager buzzed our room, and one of us tried to dash down to the wall-mounted phone at the far end of the corridor, hoping to get there before the caller hung up in despair. But if he did, what did it matter in the end?
Just before that two-year stint, we’d been in Mexico for more than three months, living in one low-end hotel after another in a selection of cities: Veracruz, San Luis Potosi, Mexico City, Guadalajara. Most were even more basic than our residence in Las Vegas. For many years afterward, we looked forward to hotel and motel stays with the enthusiasm of a consummate shopper who’s stumbled upon the biggest sale ever.
Starting in the mid-1990s and continuing for more than two decades, my hotel experiences reached a far loftier level. That’s when I began traveling around North America as an automotive journalist, attending one media drive event after another. When a big company is making the arrangements and paying the tab, the number of review stars awarded to the hotels they select goes up. Way up. So, in addition to occupying quite a few dumps over the years, I’ve been a guest of such upscale outposts as the Four Seasons in several cities, various Ritz-Carltons, the Waldorf-Astoria and Mandarin Oriental in Manhattan, the Hana Maui resort in Hawaii, and the Hotel Schloss Fuschl in Salzburg, Austria. Plus more W Hotels with their unduly dark corridors and ever-so-trendy decor than I could begin to count.
Add to that mix all the hotels I’ve occupied on my own dime, for business or pleasure or short-term residence, and the total becomes far too big to count. From basic sleeping rooms in Mexico City to typically-tiny accommodations in Paris, plus modest habitations in Tokyo and Luxembourg City, Toronto and Miami, I’ve reveled in the glories of hotel life, luxurious and decidedly non-deluxe, oblivious to the alleged joys of condos and conventional accommodations.
Back home, it was always an apartment: furnished in my younger years, unfurnished later on – mainly because furnished units became so hard to find.
Wouldn’t I rather have owned a house or condo all those years? Not a chance, when a friendly (or not) face at a check-in desk was waiting to welcome me for a day, a week, whatever I might desire at that particular moment.
Note: The above essay is adapted from the initial chapter and introduction to the author’s “in progress” book on the subject, also titled Hotel Life. Additional excerpts, as well as observations on the various delights of simple living, will appear periodically in Angular Views on Substack, or in our forthcoming travel/transportation sub-site, titled Tirekicking.
© All contents copyright 2026 by James M. Flammang (Tirekicking Today)
Image Source: James M. Flammang