The Best Motel We’ve Ever Stayed At

Straight out of a Stephen King novel

There’s this thing about me and my wife that some people might find surprising. First, we like to go on road trips. Especially spontaneous ones. The part that might surprise you is that we love to stay in cheap motels. REALLY cheap motels.

Today we found ourselves spontaneously driving through the the Nevada desert. It’s not that the trip was unplanned so much as it was the way we would get there. I chose a path that took us through some areas we had never seen before. And as it turns out, most modern men haven’t seen them either.

It was coming up on midnight. Not only had we not seen a town for over 100 miles, but we hadn’t even seen a car. The road was…let’s just say ‘unique’. If there were any engineers involved in its construction, they were certainly drunk the entire time. When I had looked on the map before we left I could’ve sworn there were supposed to be towns along our route. But alas, there was nothing but sage brush and hundreds of itsy bitsy bunny rabbits that would constantly dash in front of our car.

My wife and I hadn’t spoken for about two hours (that’s a story for another time!), and I could tell she was beginning to question my navigational skills. And then out of nowhere we saw a soft glow. We didn’t want to get our hopes up but as we got closer we could see it was a motel! We were saved!

But then we saw the sign. It was The Clown Hotel. And it was laughing at us. Parked below the flashing sign with the red nose was a truck. A big truck. The whole scene was like a story in a Stephen King book. In fact, I think I had seen the movie.

We drove past. Surely there were additional options in this town. But then my wife said, “Stop!” So I slammed on the breaks and fish-tailed our station wagon to the side of the road. She told me to turn around. Not only had we never stayed at a place like The Clown Motel, we had never even imagined such a place. This was going to be a great story.

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