The Motel I Absolutely Should’ve Skipped

There’s a special kind of exhaustion that makes no sense on paper.

Like being twelve hours into what should’ve been a four-hour drive to Atlantic City for a car show. You tell yourself you’ll push through one more exit, one more playlist, one more hour.

But eventually reality taps you on the shoulder.

That’s how I ended up pulling off at a motel so questionable it looked like it was grandfathered in before building codes were a thing. The nightly rate was low enough that I didn’t ask follow-up questions.

The carpet looked original to the late 70s and had seen… life.
The air carried that unmistakable blend of old cigarettes, stale booze, and decisions made by people running on even less sleep than me.

The clerk didn’t say a word. Just handed me an actual metal key  which somehow felt less secure than the door it unlocked.

The room itself?
Imagine a crime scene before the crime. Hopefully.
Wallpaper doing its best.
A heater that sounded like it was filing a complaint.
A bedspread that had stories but wasn’t sharing, thankfully.

I didn’t unpack.
Didn’t shower.
Didn’t pretend I was staying longer than six hours.

I lay there, half-shoed, staring at the ceiling like it might drip.

When morning came, the world looked normal again.
Cars were already rushing past the highway.
People were awake, alert, moving forward.

And I rolled out of that parking lot with a reminder:

Sometimes you don’t stop because you’re smart.
You stop because you’re human.
And tired humans make strange decisions like inadvertently turning a four-hour trip into a twelve-hour odyssey capped off by a motel that smelled like decades of stories you don’t want to know.

But the road forgives you.
Eventually, you forgive yourself too.

Off to WaWa for breakfast!